Midnight Library Book
Frida Kosofsky
This is where we begin, in Matt Haig's new novel, The Midnight Library: with a young woman on the verge of making a terrible choice. She's lost her job, her best friend, her brother. Her relationships are in shambles and her cat is dead. More importantly, she is just deeply, seemingly irretrievably, sad. She can't imagine a day that is better with her in it. Living has become nothing but a chore.
And then Nora wakes up. Not in heaven (dull) or hell (overdone) or purgatory (insert Lost joke), but in a library. The Midnight Library, which is the place people go when they find themselves hanging precariously between life and death and not entirely sure about which way to go.
The library is immense. Perhaps endless. And it is filled with nothing but books, shelves and, curiously, Nora's school librarian, Mrs. Elm. "Every life contains many millions of decisions," says Mrs. Elm.
Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.
Nora certainly has. She is wracked with regret. What would've happened if she'd married her fiance rather than walking out two days before the wedding? What would've happened if she'd stuck with the band she and her brother and their friend Ravi had started rather than bailing just when they were about to get big? What would've happened if she'd stuck with competitive swimming, been a better cat owner, been nicer to her parents, followed her best friend to Australia or become a glaciologist?
The Midnight Library is the place where Nora gets to find out. Where, for an hour, a day or a month, she gets to dip into and sample lives where she made different choices, with the ultimate goal of erasing those regrets and finding a life she's comfortable in.
But here's the problem. Haig presents all of this as a straight line. The Midnight Library is unusual in that it follows a plot with no twists, no turns that don't feel like a gentle glide. Inside the library itself, Mrs. Elm's job is to present everything to Nora very clearly and to lay out the stakes very directly. Infinite options, yes, but maybe not an infinite amount of time in which to choose. Infinite possibility, sure, but only one shot at each of them. When Nora loses hope, the library starts to collapse. When she finds herself excited again about living, things calm down.
And there's a deliberateness to it all. A simplicity to the narrative that has to be taken as a choice on Haig's part, not an accident. After meeting another "slider" (as those who can bounce around between multiverse possibilities are called), and discussing the pop-science implications of a multi-dimensional existence, Nora muses on her situation:
[She] had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called 'tree'. To be human was to continualy dumb down the world into an understandable story that keeps things simple. She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalizing creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.
Haig lives by that here. He takes what could've been (what has been in so many other books) a dark or sad or curvy or weird spin through the logical and philosophical possibilities of regret crossed with multiverse theory and ... straightens it out. There is tragedy, but it feels muted by the existence of infinite chances. There is sadness and pointlessness, soft meditations on the cost of fame and the dignity of smaller lives, lots of quotes from philosophers (because that's what Nora studied in school), and quiet thoughts about the weight of meaning in a universe where everything that can happen, does.
Ultimately, Haig gives Nora (and those of us following along with her) a straightforward path from suicide to closure, from regret to acceptance. He gives her a tree, and though there are many branches, it is still just a tree. The story, then, forms solely around the lives she passes briefly through, the choices and their consequences. Nora lives a hundred lives. A thousand. Enough of a theoretical portion of an infinity that she feels as though she has seen them all by the time we're closing on the final pages.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
"Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom's best tales"
The Midnight Library is a fantasy novel by Matt Haig, published on 13 August 2020 by Canongate Books.[1] It was abridged and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over ten episodes in December 2020.[2]
Nora Seed is unhappy with her choices in life as a sixteen-year-old and remains unhappy nineteen years later. Her best friend, Izzy, is in Australia; she has just been fired; her relationship with her brother, Joe, is sour; her music teaching gig is seemingly cancelled; and her cat has just died. Nora feels as if she is useless to the world. During the night, she attempts suicide via overdose, but ends up in a limbo library, known as the Midnight Library, managed by her school librarian, Mrs. Elm. The library is situated between life and death with millions of books filled with stories of her life had she made some different decisions. In this library, with Mrs. Elm's help, she tries to find the life in which she's the most content.[3] However, the only lives she can access are those that are possible, so she cannot find a life where her cat is alive (due to his restrictive cardiomyopathy).
While in Svalbard, she meets another limbo traveler, Hugo Lefevre, who is used to traveling around different lives, and has a brief relationship with him. Her encounter with a polar bear makes her realize she does not really want to die as much as she thought she did. Her next life features her in a successful band, originally formed with Joe. Yet, its glories fade when she finds out he died years ago and that she has broken up with a famous movie star whom she idolized in her root life.
She experiences several other lives with several other people, finally settling on a life where she majors in Philosophy and is married to Ash, a surgeon who bought guitar books from her in her root life, and buried Nora's cat while she was grieving. She also has a daughter named Molly. Through Molly, she learns to love again. This life, by far, seems the best of the lot, but she remains terrified of returning to the Midnight Library. She notices that the boy she tutored in piano, Leo, is now constantly in trouble with the police because there was no piano tutor to help him find something he was passionate about; her neighbor she supplied with medicine does not know her; and she feels completely lost.
She returns to the Midnight Library, despite her resisting, which is collapsing due to her original body dying. Realizing she isn't ready to die, she says a goodbye to Mrs. Elm and finds a book withstanding the destruction. She writes I AM ALIVE inside of it before everything disappears. She wakes up in her original life with a newfound understanding of life, but she is still suffering from the overdose from the night before. She manages to get to the hospital with the help of her neighbor. Her brother comes to visit from London after being notified by the hospital and the two reconcile. She receives a text from Izzy and the two plan a visit together. Nora notices Ash and plans to talk to him sometime, and she resumes her piano lessons with Leo. She finally meets her former librarian in a nursing home and the two play a game of chess.
According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on 14 critic reviews with 5 being "rave" and 8 being "positive" and 1 being "mixed".[4] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.10 out of 5) from the site which was based on 5 critic reviews. [5]
The Midnight Library was named a bestseller by The New York Times bestseller,[6] The Boston Globe,[7] and The Washington Post.[8] Good Morning America selected it as a Book Club Pick.[9]
Booklist[10] and BookPage[11] gave the book a starred review. The Book Reporter[12] and The Arts Desk[13] raved about it. The book also received positive reviews from The New York Times,[14] The Guardian,[15] ZYZZYVA,[16] The Scotsman,[17]The Sunday Times,[18] Library Journal,[19] Kirkus Reviews,[6]The Washington Post,[20] Publishers Weekly,[21] and Post Independent.[22] NPR gave a mixed review.[23]
The book was also included in "Best of" lists from The Christian Science Monitor,[24] Amazon,[25] PureWow,[26] She Reads,[27] Lit Hub, St. Louis Public Radio, and The Washington Post.[13]
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