I was given this book by a friend who’d abandoned it because she said she didn’t like way it “moves about all over the place”. Well I’m really glad she passed it on because I was very taken with this 2023 novel. And I can cope with flashbacks. I’m used to that sort of thing. Speaking as someone who once had to unravel Margaret Atwood’s highly impenetrable Surfacing for an A level class, I’m not much fazed by multiple time zones in fiction.
We All Want Impossible Things is about friendship and loss and it’s profoundly moving. Edi is in the final stages of cancer and is dying in a New York hospice. Ash, who narrates, is her lifelong friend – and you’ll go a long way before you find another celebration of friendship as powerful as this.
So how did they become friends, what have they shared and who else is in their lives? That’s what Newman gradually unwinds and we meet all sorts of decent people – both as they were and as they are now as they visit the hospice and try to be supportive. Ash’s divorced husband, Honey, for example is a real treasure and beautifully presented. Why on earth did she let him go? Ash herself wonders that too. Then there’s Edi’s gorgeous husband Jude and her beloved son, Dash who’s only eight and needs to be shielded from the worst of what’s happening. Ash’s daughters are a delight too. So is Edi’s brother and the staff at the hospice including Cedar, a musician whose job is to sing to the residents.
Ash is, by her own admission, a flawed character. She tries to suppress her grief by indulging in inappropriate sex with too many people and although she is bleakly, darkly funny about this, her behaviour is, actually pitiful. And I, for one, felt a bit cross with at least one of the men who takes advantage of her vulnerability.
There’s a lot of food in this novel because it’s a comfort at times of great sadness especially when it’s shared. So there’s food taken to the hospice to tempt Edi and to nourish anyone visiting her in a party-like way. Back home there are “take out” meals and food cooked by various people to feed anyone who’s around. It’s effectively a metaphor for love.
We All Want Impossible Things is not, emphatically not, a novel about despair. Edi has accepted her situation and, of course, contrary to one of Ash’s fantasy day dreams, there is no miracle recovery. The novel takes exactly the path you know it will from page one. Acceptance is a major theme, and eventually, every character finds a way forward so there’s also a lot of optimism – along with the warmth and compassion.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy.
