Rainbow's Landline!

One of the recent books I read is Rainbow Rowell’s best selling novel of 2014, Landline. Adjudged as the Goodreads Best Book of 2014 in the fiction category, Landline marks Rowell’s return to adult fiction after her two best selling young adult novels, Eleanor and Park (2013) and Fangirl (2013). Landline is Rowell’s take on marriage, love and mature relationships.

                                                                                                                                                                                                   

               

                  Georgie McCool is a successful scriptwriter who is very much aware that her marriage is in the rocks. Her husband, Neal, is a stay-at home dad who looks after the kids and patiently waits for Georgie to commit her time for them. He has increasingly grown distant from her and is discontent with a sterile conjugal life due to her endless work. She drives the last nail in the coffin when she chooses to soar high in her career and ditches her husband and kids on celebrating Christmas together with Neal’s family at Nebraska. However, just after Neal and the kids depart for Nebraska, Georgie begins to crumble. She worries if her marriage is over, having realised that perhaps this time she has pushed Neal a little too far away from herself. She begins a journey to rediscover herself, her feelings for Neal and to achieve a full understanding of the conjugal relationship she shares with Neal.

                        Rowell explores the themes of travails of marriage, midlife crisis, work and parenthood adroitly through a psychological study of her characters and the deft use of the instrument of magic realism. Georgie attempts to fix her marriage by starting afresh her conjugal relationship with Neal. She attempts to talk to Neal, but the Neal she keeps talking to from her teenage bedroom using the old yellow landline is the young Neal, one that she had fallen in love with. As Christmas draws near, Georgie travels between past and present to understand her own feelings and her relationships. She is left to consider if they should stay together, if they are enough as a couple to make each other happy.

                          Beneath the sparkling narrative lies a subcutaneous tension that Rowell has adroitly captured. Once again Rowell proves herself as a master storyteller in her ability to narrate a heart-warming story that dissects a modern marriage to talk of the problems of modern life and relationships. At the heart of her story lie the imperfect characters - Georgie and Neal.  Georgie is a far cry from a perfect lover, mother or wife. Neal is a quite brooding man whose stolid passivity and resigned acceptance constantly conveys Georgie her inability to make him happy. It is also interesting to note how consummately Rowell has reversed the gender roles in her story. The man patiently waits for his wife’s attention and time as he looks after the house and kids. But Rowell falls back to her young adult strain and gives into that idealist and escapist nerve. What rubs off against me is the forced reconciliation of the story. Somewhere in the end the characters seem to give up their free will to resolve Rowell’s plot. The author manipulates her characters to script a happy ending that is at once affected and fake. However, Rowell’s lucid language and swift narrative, evenly distributed with humour, make Landline a page turner. It is indeed a good read that combines the pleasures of a young adult novel and the plot of an adult fiction.