“Before Everything” by Victoria Redel; Viking (274 pages, $26)
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“This, Helen thought, this is what Anna will do. She will teach us all how to do this thing we don’t know how to do.”
That thing is life’s end — coming too soon, to a woman in her 50s. In Victoria Redel’s gentle, rich novel “Before Everything,” Anna is the center of a group of five friends; a bond held tightly since childhood, when they christened their quintet “The Old Friends.” Now Anna’s long journey with cancer has no more bends in its road: She is dying, and Helen, Ming, Molly and Caroline have left their complicated lives to be with her, for just a little longer.
Written in an impressionistic series of chapters and subchapters (each with its own brief title), floating back and forth between the group’s past and present, “Before Everything” creates a tight, vivid world; you picture Anna at the center of a circle, with the four others (and Anna’s semi-estranged husband, Reuben) arranged around the edge, looking inward. “The world steeply fell away. The morning news, the headline lost. No big world. Even their lives at home tapered to a few images. Just Anna.”
An unfussy but poetic writer (the phrase “the creamy, warm spread of soup” feels perfect — it’s the unexpected “spread”), Redel makes the reader part of the circle; we come to know and love Anna as her friends do. And we observe sadly as the writing from Anna’s point of view becomes slowly more blurry; the person, before our eyes, begins to fade away. Anna was, we learn, someone who wasn’t much of a reader: “She wasn’t interested in difficult narratives. She liked stories where you got close to a character.” Both terribly sad and unexpectedly companionable, this quiet book does just that.
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