Thomas Christopher Greene's If I Forget You is a lovely little gem of a novel. It is perfect summer reading, light without being lightweight, and without giving anything away it has one of the most satisfying endings I've read in a long time. It is a story about lost loves and second chances and while the story develops along fairly predictable lines it was a comforting and entertaining read with just enough suspense and uncertainty to draw me along.
It's hard not to like a story about a poet and a painter. Henry and Margot are an unlikely pair but then when has the road to happiness not been paved with difficulties. Each character tells their side of the story moving forward and backward in time. It begins in 2012 when on a beautiful spring day Henry Gold, a poet and professor who teaches at NYU, sees Margot across a busy Plaza. It's literally a pigeon that first catches his eye. The bird unceremoniously slams into the glass above a revolving door just as Margot is exiting. All three are stunned at that moment. The bird, Margot who leans down over it to see it is still alive, and Henry who calls out to her. When Margot realizes who has said her name she rushes to a taxi and speeds out of sight. And so the scene is set and the mystery of Henry and Margot begins to unravel.
Bits of each character's lives are slowly revealed and cobbled together to tell their story. Henry is divorced with a daughter he sees on the weekends. His promising career as a poet has slipped into something comfortable and maybe a little predictable much like his personal life. When he sees Margot across that plaza it is obvious many years have passed and some unknown history between them exists. To see her now raises all sorts of questions and sparks emotions he thought long buried. He knows she has seen him, too, but he has lost sight of her and is left only with her name on his lips--a "tiny poem of a name" he thinks. Margot was only in the city for the day to lunch with her mother, a grande dame kind of woman. Margot has made what appears to be a "good marriage" when looking in from the outside. A successful husband, two grown children, summers on the Vineyard and time to paint.
How do you find someone who doesn't want to be found is a question that has haunted Henry for far too long. And then the story slips back in time some twenty years earlier to Bannister College where Henry is an unlikely student--the son of Jewish working class parents with a Brooklyn accent and a way with words. It is thanks to his talent playing baseball that he ends up at Bannister in the first place, but he soon turns in his bat for a pen to pursue his true passion. Margot Fuller is wealthy and entitled but not self absorbed. She might carry wealthy baggage but she doesn't flaunt it and she falls hard for Henry. And so their love affair begins despite the challenges of their different backgrounds.
To reveal more of the plot would be to spoil the journey, which races to its not entirely unexpected conclusion. It's how Henry and Margot come together and are forced apart and find each other again and how Greene weaves it all together, throws in a few surprises and ends the story with such eloquence that makes this such a pleasure to read. The narrations separated by character and time work together quite nicely to create a rhythm, the mystery of this relationship filled with unknown (to the reader) obstacles presented in the opening pages are followed by scenes from the present interleaved with scenes from the past to paint the picture of their love affair. Somewhere just past the middle of the story the strands all meet up and then the hard part begins, how do you pick up the pieces of a love affair seemingly irrevocably lost so many years before.
In the acknowledgements at the end of the book the author writes about his inspiration and how the book came about, impressively written in only six months. The story must have literally flowed from his pen, and reading about Henry and Margot you can tell. Many thanks to St. Martin's Press for sending If I Forget You my way.