From the very first page of Susan Minot’s latest novel, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” Ivy Cooper, a single mother in her early 50s, has sex on her mind. The scene opens with her in the bath, thinking about the sex she’s had in that tub, the sex she’d like to have — but also, her bills, her writing, her young son, the Iraq war.
So, when the doorbell rings and she runs to get it wrapped only in a towel, opening the door on a man some 20 years younger with a shadowed face, handsome, with “full mouth” and “bruised eyes,” you can guess where this story is going. “She saw something in him unusual, as if not touched by the usual things,” Minot writes in her characteristic style that is both dreamy and precise.
Over the next 300 pages Minot strives mightily to convey every aspect of Ivy’s obsessive desire for this vagabond musician, Ansel Fleming, who showed up that night to escort her to a party. It is a passion that defies common sense, promises to upend lives, and by the end of the novel, nearly drives her out of her mind.
Never mind that Ansel recently spent seven years in jail on a drug charge. That he tells her up front he’s not looking to fall in love. None of that can shake her conviction, formed the first night she met him, that wherever he was “held more dense molecules than were in the rest of the room.”
The counterpoint to Ivy’s drama with Ansel is her all-consuming love for and anxiety about her young son, Nicky. She is wracked with guilt for walking out on his father the year before, leaving their farm in Virginia to take the boy with her to New York, which she finds more conducive to her life as a writer.
The novel toggles back and forth between these two stories, the erotic and maternal, interspersed with scenes from Ivy’s bohemian life in downtown New York with wealthier friends who invite her into their stylish homes. Then Nicky gets sick and suddenly, Ivy’s priorities become clear.
In real life, we often become impatient with friends in the grip of an obsession, erotic or otherwise. So, too, in fiction, where it’s crucial that readers at a minimum remain interested in the lives of the characters. Minot succeeds intermittently in making us care about Ivy. As for Ansel, it’s obvious from the start that he’s pretty much of a jerk.
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