The Bookseller

July 29, 1996
Contemporary notions of love, family and community evolve through this insightful bildungsroman set principally in a decadent Toronto of the 1970s. Narrator Paul Stevens has always been somewhat marginalized by the strong, reckless presence of his star-crossed older brother, Henry. An affair with Martha, an older married woman, brings new influences into Paul's life, including the writings of Dickens and Flaubert. When Paul leaves Henry's auto shop to sell used books for a local dealer, he doesn't realize that the dealer, Fenwick, is Martha's husband. But this is only the first of many tangled connections that will form a new urban family for Paul, whose father is dead and whose mother has her own new life. When mysterious young Judith, a drug addict, comes to work at the bookstore, she and Paul seem immediately destined for each other. Their trysts in the honeymoon suite of a seedy hotel change Paul's life further--only to lead it around again to Henry, his original and perhaps insoluble problem. Cohen (Emotional Arithmetic) brings these complex relationships to life in the thoughtful, slightly elegiac voice of Paul, who recalls the story as a middle-aged man. At times, Paul's hindsight, intruding for a single thought or paragraph, is disorienting. But Cohen's investigation of unlikely, yet inevitable, human interdependence is wise and sensitive.