Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent
and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with
my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm
thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I
don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her
in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty
years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul,
Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she
had thought.
Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new
arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life
for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even
Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart,
urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated
and dangerous love actually is.
As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward
something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a
second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own
temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the
realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of
love, and the unfathomable depths of faith.
Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is
about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the
need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as
her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband
Rory -- and, of course, the monk downstairs -- that makes this story shine.