Book Review: Goodbye for Now

Happy Book Review Tuesday!  Today we’re venturing into a world of technology, death, and hope for the living – but, surprise surprise, it’s actually quite an uplifting trip…  My review copy of Goodbye for Nowwas provided courtesy of LuxuryReading.com, which also hosted the original (shorter) post of this book review on August 2, 2012 (available here).

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Goodbye for Now

The title and back-cover blurb are pithy, the cover is whimsical (airplanes flying in a perfect cerulean sky, dotted with just the right amount of wispy white clouds).  The story is pretty much as far afield from those two adjectives as possible though – in the best of all possible ways.

Goodbye for Now is ostensibly the story of Sam Elling, a computer coding whiz-kid who works for an internet dating company.  But it seems to me it’s really the tale of the quest for love and happiness in a technologically overwhelmed world that continually blurs the lines between physical reality and cyber-simulation.  This overlay is precisely the kind of goofy juxtaposition of people and situations that the author, Laurie Frankel, expertly weaves throughout this surprisingly touching and deftly navigated tale of life, love, and loss.

In a very small nutshell, Sam develops a computer program to match people with their soul mate, gets fired by the dating company because they lose business, develops a computer program that helps the girl of his dreams “talk” to her dead grandmother – and then turns that program into a business to help others deal with the death of loved ones.  Hard to imagine how that could go wrong in any way, shape, or form, isn’t it?  (I’m not making light of this, don’t misunderstand; my point is that, as with all things, no good deed of Sam’s goes unpunished.)

Of course, things don’t play out the way Sam intends them to.  We all know how good intentions usually play out, now don’t we?  But the journey Sam, his girlfriend Meredith, and their friends and family take is a fascinating and well-crafted one, full of the bumps and bruises and life-altering-but-seemingly-unimportant-at-the-time moments that make real life frustrating and challenging and beautiful and magical and devastating and uplifting in turns.

Frankel skillfully creates a world peopled by characters in both senses of the word – Sam and his compatriots are unique and believable and utterly human, and they are the perfect teachers for the lessons she carefully weaves into her thoroughly enjoyable piece of fiction.  She delivers those lessons gently, through narratives that will break your heart and send you rolling to the floor in equal parts, told from the perspectives of very real-feeling, well-intentioned, optimistic, flawed, and utterly human characters.  You won’t be able to help but love Sam, even if you find yourself, like me, occasionally cringing at the ramifications of the type of world his brilliance at coding allows him to create.

There’s a lot of food for thought here, packaged nicely in a very palatable and enjoyable love story.  In this world in which the boundaries of the possible are constantly being pushed, in which the aforementioned lines between reality and simulation are constantly growing fuzzier, all focus is on what can be done.  Frankel reminds us that there’s another vastly element in the equation of possibility that gets ignored all too often: the difference between ‘can’ and ‘should’ – and that difference is Grand Canyon-wide.  Thanks for helping draw attention to that element, Ms. Frankel – and I for one look forward to seeing whether you continue pushing us to think with our fiction as we move into the type of future you’ve so elegantly crafted.