The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

By Gabrielle Zevin

I find it ever so slightly odd that this novel opens with a character who is, while important to the story, absent for so much of the book. It’s an interesting choice and it lets us meet the main character, A.J. Fikry, through the eyes of someone else, at one of the lowest points in his life. An interesting choice indeed, and this book is not boring - it is full of interesting choices and beautiful writing.

We follow Amelia Loman over to Alice Island, where she is going to pitch the latest books from her company to the book store owner, A.J. Fikry. Amelia tells him that she has taken over for the previous rep, who had died, and A.J. is very rude.

From their first contact you might think A.J. is a real jerk but then the story turns and we see it from A.J.’s perspective. His beloved wife is but a ghost in his dreams, having died in a car accident almost two years before.

“She had been two months pregnant. They hadn’t told anyone yet. There had been disappointments before. Standing in the waiting room outside the morgue, he rather wished they had told people. At least there would have been a brief period of happiness before this longer period of  . . . he did not yet know what to call this.”

The night after Amelia’s first visit, A.J. gets drunk while looking at his first edition book of Tamerlane. When he wakes, the book is gone. He hightails it down to the police station and has an absence seizure while talking to Chief Lambiase. The Chief insists on taking A.J. to the hospital to get checked out.

Later that year, two days before Christmas, A.J. finds a two year old child left in his bookstore. How? Why? By whom? There is a note asking him to care for the little girl. It is a Friday night on an island in the winter so he has to care for her, with a little help from his sister-in-law, for the weekend. They bond. He decides to adopt her.

“A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It’s completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.”

How Amelia comes back into the story, the truth of the baby’s parentage and how she affects the story, other twists and turns, along with many life and literary observations, make this an interesting and lovely book.

A.J. observes on reading The Luck of Roaring Camp by Bret Harte as a college student and then later in life, “Methinks I have grown soft in my middle age. But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives.”

I did find this book to be slightly uneven. Zevin tried to pack a lot in and it covers a large period of time. There were parts that felt true and made my heart sing so that it deserved a 5 star review, then there was a portion where I thought, "Isn't this over yet?" and planned to leave it at 3 stars. In its entirety, I would have hated to miss this journey. She took some chances and a few of them didn’t work as well as others but, in the end, the cumulative effect was magnificent. It deserves a good 4.5 stars. I would recommend this book to anyone.