A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella

Published by Scribner on November 29, 2022

Most of the events in A Quiet Life take place in Pennsylvania. Those events revolve around the intersecting lives of three characters, all of whom have experienced a recent loss. The intersection is likely meant to illustrate the universality of loss and the importance of connecting with others in times of personal tragedy.

Chuck Ayers’ wife died. He’s having difficulty disposing of her things. He can’t decide whether to embark on the annual vacation that they always took as a couple, a trip to Hilton Head for which he has already paid.

Kirsten Bonato has been numb since her father was murdered. She put her ambition to become a veterinarian on hold and took a job at a pet rescue. She has a thing for her boss David, but Grayson is “promising and new.” One suspects that Grayson will be in Kirsten’s past as soon as someone even newer comes along.

Riley’s father Kyle picked up Riley from school. He has a shared custody arrangement but it wasn’t his day to have Riley. Riley's mother, Ella Burke, is understandably upset but since Kyle has parental rights and probably isn’t a threat to Riley’s safety, the police don’t want to devote significant resources to what is more likely a custody dispute than a kidnapping. Later that night, Ella discovers that some of Riley’s clothes and toys are missing from her room, raising the fear that Riley’s disappearance is meant to be permanent. Kyle's eventual explanation of his motive didn't strike me as being particularly credible.

The three central characters indulge in internal monologues, although Kirsten’s tend to focus on whether shiny and new Grayson is a better deal than handsome David who makes her feel safe and squirmy inside. Chuck’s thoughts are less frivolous. He thinks about and talks to his dead wife but he's strangely obsessed with a young woman named Natasha who was once his wife’s project. He fears that he did not treat Natasha well. His wife’s desire to help Natasha triggered the most serious argument of their marriage. It is an argument he now regrets. He seems to think that making amends with Natasha will help him make amends with his wife.

Ella is hard on herself for going outside on the day of her daughter’s disappearance, as if staying home would have made a difference. Ella also spends time rehashing her failed relationship with Kyle in resentful detail, musings presumably designed to show the reader that she is unnecessarily hard on herself for being clueless about Kyle's character flaws when he accused her of being frigid and dull.

The lives intersect in ways that seem forced. Chuck meets Kirsten at the pet rescue when he contemplates adopting a pet to ease his loneliness. Kirsten turns out to be a former student of Chuck’s wife. Ella delivers newspapers when she’s not working in a bridal shop. Chuck meets Ella when she slips on the ice while delivering his newspaper. He gives her a pillow and a blanket because, if you’ve slipped on an icy sidewalk, you know you want nothing more than a pillow and a blanket while you lie on a sheet of ice. Ella meets Kirsten through David, who conveniently turns out to be Ella’s neighbor.

Chuck is the only character I cared about. His grief is profound. Ethan Joella portrays it in a way that makes pain palpable without reducing it to a cliché. Ella’s fear about her daughter’s safety is believable but carries less impact, although mothers might relate to a contrived “every parent’s worst nightmare” scenario more than I did. Kirsten’s loss is almost an aside to the story of her love triangle, a loss invented to wedge Kirsten into the story’s larger theme.

The power of kindness is a secondary theme. Chuck’s wife changed Natasha’s life by being kind. Chuck improves Ella’s life through improbable acts of kindness. Kirsten lifts Ella’s spirits, and then Chuck’s, by being a kind soul. Oddly, Ella thinks to herself that she misses kindness when everyone, including a cop who is helping her find Kyle, is kind to Ella.

And, of course, the story is about the importance of connecting with others. The execution of that theme is sometimes a bit schmaltzy, if only because its execution is far from subtle. As characters interact, they quickly dissect each other, instantly identifying the cause of their pain, perhaps saving them from years of therapy. Kirsten thinking that her dead father sent her to help Chuck cope with his sorrow is a bit much. Characters come to embrace their neediness as if neediness is a welcome revelation. A reader can almost hear Streisand singing “People Who Need People” in the background. Obvious sentences like “Chuck smiles at the scene and thinks how necessary love is” underscore the narrative’s lack of subtlety.

The predictably happy endings make the novel a bit too “feel good’ for my taste. The tidiness with which the stories wrap up is improbable. The novel also suffers from redundancy. For example, Chuck tells us repeatedly of his belief that he will find his dead wife, or himself, in Hilton Head. Ella reruns her happy memories of Riley, even though she’s only been gone a short time. Kirsten’s indecision about which man she wants to sleep with next is tedious.

There is an audience for books like A Quiet Life. Joella’s smooth prose and keen observation make for easy reading. Some of the story’s emotional moments seem genuine. A Quiet Life is not a book I disliked. It just isn’t a book that made me believe the story was real. I’m recommending it despite its faults because the parts that I liked, including Chuck’s story, I really liked.

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