Review of The Pilot’s Wife
by Anita Shreve
reviewed by Byron Merritt
Kathryn Lyons is about to receive the worst news of her life...and it isn’t that her husband of 16 years, Jack, was just killed when the commercial airliner he was flying crashed. No, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Kathryn.
An airline investigator, Robert Hart, has come to Mrs. Lyons’ house to give her and her daughter (Mattie) the bad news. But he’s also there for another reason: to find out how much Kathryn REALLY knew about her husband. Come to find out, she didn’t know him well at all. Or at least as well as she thought she did.
Jack had been leading a double life, assuming matrimonial duties on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and Kathryn is about to come face to face with her polygamist rival in England. And she soon makes a flurry of other discoveries about her husband that turns her world upside down (was he responsible for the plane crashing?)
What makes a book interesting is twofold: #1: you have to write with conviction, knowledge and gripping prose. And the author, Anita Shreve, does this. She’s well-groomed in the art of storytelling and that is what kept me reading this book. #2: the story must be compelling and original. And this is where Mrs. Shreve has fallen short. The ‘secrets’ that get revealed about Jack’s life are telegraphed too much to the reader. I knew what was coming long before the author showed me. There really wasn’t anything compelling about the story (spouse loses husband, grieves, tries to sort out life, makes shocking discoveries about her former mate, finds new love, comes to emotional terms with her life, moves on). Pretty standard fare, I’d say.
I’d never really read an “Oprah’s Book Club Selection” before (March 1999), and I’d have to say that I was pretty disappointed in this choice. Let’s hope some of the others are more readable than this.