A Novel Love Story

In A Novel Love Story, the author explores coping with and healing from loss through the characters of Elsy and Anders. The town of Eloraton acts as a safe place for these characters to process their feelings without the ever-changing variables in the real world. Elsy admits that when she first arrived in Eloraton, she “wanted to stay in a world where the plots are predictable and the endings are happy. Somewhere just as frozen as [she is]” (230). Similarly, Anders spends years in the town because its stagnancy is within his comfort level, reminding him of Rachel and their relationship. Both characters grow to welcome change by the end of the novel, processing their emotions and finding the will to move forward in life.

Throughout the novel, Elsy frequently refers to her life as “frozen” after Liam unexpectedly ended their engagement. Though this was the catalytic moment for the pain Elsy experienced over the following years, their breakup also led her to see how she had lost herself in her relationship and had not been in control of her own life for years. Elsy describes what followed by saying, “I never found my footing again, and I’d been stumbling ever since” (37). Elsy continued to deal with the aftermath of her breakup when she saw her friends’ lives moving on without her, causing her to go to the annual book club retreat alone, describing this choice as “the first real decision [she]’d made for [her]self in…In years” (176). The loss of agency over her own life ate at Elsy, preventing her from moving on with her life until the retreat, yet in Eloraton, the most important thing she learns is how to turn the page on the past and not let it define her future. Her views change when she learns that she can take a chance on herself, rather than relying on others to guide her.

Anders suffered an even more devastating loss a few months after Elsy’s breakup when he was in a car accident that killed his fiancée, Rachel. He tells Elsy that he “didn’t know how to live in a world without her” (261), so when he stumbled upon Eloraton exactly the way Rachel had left it, Anders stayed for years. As with Elsy’s life, Anders went for years without anything really changing, frozen until Elsy arrives in Eloraton and helps him move on. Anders tells her,

I was afraid that if this story was finished, that would be it—there would be no more stories, and no more Rachel—but I was wrong about that, too. Because her stories live on in you, and your friends, and everyone else who reads her work. She’s gone, and she’s not (261).

Both Anders and Elsy grapple with how to live their lives after experiencing significant loss, yet both ultimately learn from their past while not letting it hold them back from their futures.