So, when the doorbell rings and she runs to get it wrapped only in a towel, opening the door on a man some 20 years younger with a shadowed face, handsome, with “full mouth” and “bruised eyes,” you can guess where this story is going. “She saw something in him unusual, as if not touched by the usual things,” Minot writes in her characteristic style that is both dreamy and precise.
Over the next 300 pages Minot strives mightily to convey every aspect of Ivy’s obsessive desire for this vagabond musician, Ansel Fleming, who showed up that night to escort her to a party. It is a passion that defies common sense, promises to upend lives, and by the end of the novel, nearly drives her out of her mind.
Never mind that Ansel recently spent seven years in jail on a drug charge. That he tells her up front he’s not looking to fall in love. None of that can shake her conviction, formed the first night she met him, that wherever he was “held more dense molecules than were in the rest of the room.”
The counterpoint to Ivy’s drama with Ansel is her all-consuming love for and anxiety about her young son, Nicky. She is wracked with guilt for walking out on his father the year before, leaving their farm in Virginia to take the boy with her to New York, which she finds more conducive to her life as a writer.