Where or When

By Anita Shreve

This book seemed to be just a mediocre version of another Anita Shreve novel, The Last Time They Met. The stories have so many similarities right down to the two main female characters having spent time in the Peace Corps in Africa. But this story never reaches the heights of The Last Time They Met.

Siân Roberts and Charles Callahan meet for the first time as teenagers at summer camp, where they spend a week together. They are each other’s first love. Thirty years later Charles, now a middle-aged insurance broker, spots a photograph of Siân while leafing through his newspaper's literary supplement. Although married with three daughters Charles writes to Siân, who by now is a published poet, also married and mother of two children. Siân writes back, their correspondence develops into intimacy and they agree to meet again at the scene of their summer camp, now an inn, situated midway between her Pennsylvania onion farm and his Rhode Island seaside town.

Charles chooses to tell his wife about his affair with Siân on Christmas Eve, not the best of times to make that kind of confession. It also turns out that Charles and his family are about to loose their home because of overdue mortgage payments.

Meanwhile tragedy is also lurking for Siân's family. When her husband, who has suspected something is going on, finds a man's shirt in his wife's cupboard he goes to the barn and tries to shoot himself.

This is basically the plot of the story. It totally lacks drive in any direction and all the reader is left with is two people in their mid-40s going back and forth contemplating whether or not they should be together while hurting everyone around them. The ending is also somewhat disappointing. Rather straightforward and boring, and very overly dramatised.