A Lover's Almanac

The Seasons

by Maureen Howard

A daring attempt to decipher the mysteries of how and why two people fall in love underscores the romance of two young lovers--Artie, a boyish computer wiz from New York and Louise, a committed artist from the Midwest. Tour.

Genres: Novels, Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Maureen Howard is the author of seven novels, including Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, all of which were nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. 'Facts of Life' is an award-winning autobiography. She is a 1952 Smith College alumnae and has taught at a number of American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Amherst, and Yale, and was recently awarded the Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard's A Lover's Almanac is the first novel of a difficult tetralogy based on the 4 seasons. Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring, The Silver Screen, and The Rags of Time, the latter published last year, complete the series. By rereading the first 3 volumes before tackling The Rags of Time, I hope to remind myself of the themes Howard concentrates on as well as some characters who reappear. A Lover's Almanac takes place during the winter, though the actual dates of the novel begin on January 1st and end on March 31st, a slight doctoring of time in favor of convenience and symmetry. It's a love story in which 2 characters rummage through their personal histories and memories attempting to charge their present with meaning and order. By discovering the truths of their pasts they can understand who they are. The aim of many novels, sure, but Howard nails big ideas into the beams and joists of the familiar dates and predictions of The Old Farmer's Almanac holding this fiction together. That little book of folksy wisdom and promise helps inform the life and love of these characters. In the end all the standard features of the almanac have fused with weather and the night sky and predictive signs and mathematics to become lives and loves. As I said, Howard writes difficult fiction. But it's rewarding. One character says the problem is as beautiful as the solution. A novel of ideas, I suppose, though not at all a cold novel of intellectual sterility. Rather, a novel of winter in New York City in which the "cold rain" and "falling weather" of the almanac's predictions figure while it remains a warm novel of love and connections to the past, and of people who find themselves at the center of time and everything the almanac prepares us for. What's rendered in these winter months of 2000 is birth, death, and everything in between. I think it's accomplished fiction that soars, its arc as elegant as the sweep of the zodiac.

[Holly Troup · Rating 5 out of 5]

New York in the year 2000

Artie (Arthur) O'Conner, a young computer wizard with a lofty I.Q. but no plans for the future, is obsessed with his past. Left an orphan when his flamboyant mother died, and never knowing who his father was, Artie rebelled against the safe life his grandparents gave him, and became an iconoclast and an outsider. He fails to listen to his beloved girlfriend Lou's advice: "Get serious". After making a terrible scene at a New Year's Eve party, Artie is banished , in disgrace, from Lou's life, and he must find a way to woo her back.
Lou ( Louise) Moffat is an up-and-coming artist who, although she ran away from her home on a Wisconsin farm, is inspired by that bucolic world. Her dismissal of Artie leaves her bereft, unable to paint or even eat or sleep, but she remains adamant in her refusal to listen to Artie's pleas.
So begins A LOVER'S ALMANAC, a novel that uses THE OLD FARMER'S ALMANAC as its format. Maureen Howard entwines Lou and Artie's fateful romance with stories of other lovers, family members, and friends. We meet Artie's grandfather, Cyril O'Conner, who gave up reading history for a life on Wall Street, only to find that when he finally had the time to read his beloved history books, he was going blind. Sylvie, a war refugee from Austria who has loved Cyril most of her adult life. Bud Boyce, corporate leader of Skylark, an innovative computer company, and Artie's old friend and sometime boss, who is entranced by weather reports and dreams of having his own weather station, but fails to understand that even if you can predict the weather, you are still at its mercy.
Woven into the captivating stories of all the characters are THE OLD FARMER's ALMANAC style entries that trace the year's progress month by month, deliver good advice, and deliver historical events and biographies of famous genii ranging from Ben Franklin to Comenius.
A LOVER"S ALMANAC is a fine book, enormously entertaining----it is a very good read.

[Judith Slawson King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite of the four books comprising Maureen Howard's intricately plotted and exquisitely rendered quadrilogy each set in a different season of the year. Set in a bitterly cold winter at the turn-of-the-millennium, the narrative features two couples: an innovative artist achieving success in the NYC art milieu and her love, a computer genius with questions about his identity; and his grandfather, a successful man of business reunited after half a century with the ethereal and studious woman he loved and lost over one afternoon half a century ago.

[Charlaralotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful characters and wonderful writing. A style similar to Jonathan Lethem, but more mature and even in tone. Am sad that I came across this book completely by chance in the library stacks, whereas the publicity for Lethem's books has me reading them as they are published.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in undergrad - winner of Dos Passos Award