The Lover’s Dictionary by David LevithanFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like:

autonomy, n.
“I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I knew it would be okay to live together. (23)

As the entries accumulate, you start to get a sense of the couple’s personalities and pasts: both are smart and bookish; he’s shy; she’s more socially at ease; he writes; she drinks. Her dad left her mom; her family life has been difficult; in the past she’s dated the wrong kind of guy. He’s stable, with a steady job and parents who were always supportive of him and are still together and happy. They live in New York City, and it’s the explicitly NYC-ish entries that I found myself loving the most: “ebullient,” about running through the rain down 6th Ave after a concert while everyone else is huddled under an awning; “halcyon,” about a perfect snow-day, going back to bed because everything’s closed; “impromptu,” about summer Friday afternoons that don’t have a plan but turn out delicious, lunch followed by museum-ing or taking the ferry or whatever city-ish things you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t had time for.

I like, too, how the narrator captures the ups and downs of a relationship, loveliness and doubt and the everyday routines, and I like Levithan’s language, which is sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes fanciful, sometimes luminous. I like the unexpected bits, like this great image in the entry for “paleontology”: “I sat there as you excavated your boyfriends, laid the bones out on the table for me to see. I shifted them around, tried to reassemble them, if only to see if they bore any resemblance to me” (157). I still like Levithan’s YA work more, maybe because I really love what he does with a more straightforward novelistic form, maybe because the grown-up “issues” of this book (a partner who drinks too much, the question of infidelity) felt a little over-emphasized at times, but still, I’m glad I read this.