A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella

A Quiet Life: A Novel by Ethan Joella
Published by Scribner
Publication date: November 29, 2022
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary

Bookshop, Amazon

We live so much of our lives without telling anyone.

Apparently, this is going to be an emotion drenched week of reviews. When A Quiet Life opens, a Pennsylvania suburb is locked in the throes of winter, while three of its residents are just as frozen in their grief. Chuck is a man in his early 70s whose beloved wife died suddenly from cancer, Ella’s young daughter is missing, and Kirsten is a woman in her early 20s whose father was murdered. For each these events are enough to cloak them in the kind of lead that drags down every movement and refuses to let in any light. They make their way through their days, but only with a profound sense of loneliness. That is until the random intersections of their lives come together to form a web that supports them all.

Chuck should have been getting ready to head to Hilton Head with his wife, Kirsten was applying to veterinarian schools, and although Ella’s marriage needed work, she was happily raising her daughter. Now, those lives feel like snapshots from long ago and reality is a slog until the world rights itself again. With no path forward out of their grief each character is stuck. Chuck spends his days alone, unable to act on anything involving his wife. Kirsten works at an animal rescue shelter, finding comfort in the routine and the kindness of the two men she works with, even as she picks at the wound of what her father wanted for her, the joy he brought into people’s lives, the senselessness of his death. Ella’s life is the most shattered. From the security of a home with a husband and much-loved daughter she’s now penniless and working two jobs. Her life revolves around the phone, calling the police and waiting for a call.

A Quiet Life is the kind of novel that makes you look at your neighbor or a stranger in the grocery store checkout line and wonder what they might really be dealing with. Chuck, Ella, and Kirsten are all functional in their daily lives, they appear “normal”. It’s the care with which Joella peels back their layers that pulls the reader in; that he can get so deeply into the minds and hearts of such different people—an elderly man, a middle-aged woman, and a young woman. But even that pales against his ability to evoke feelings that transcend the page, allowing the reader to feel the characters’ emotions, even without ever having had a similar experience.

As the characters move through their days, they are being brought into closer proximity to each other through mundane events. A newspaper delivered, a fall on a slippery sidewalk, the desire to adopt a pet for company. But even then, as the coincidences multiple, the actions and responses of Ella, Kirsten, and Chuck remain plausible, reasonable. A feat that may seem easy, but (as I’ve learned with recent reading) is not. We live in a world where extremes have become the norm and yet even when things get messy in A Quiet Life, I was so invested in these characters and their situations that it was all relatable.

As the characters move through their days, they are being brought into closer proximity to each other through mundane events. A newspaper delivered, a fall on a slippery sidewalk, the desire to adopt a pet for company. But even then, as the coincidences multiple, the actions and responses of Ella, Kirsten, and Chuck remain plausible, reasonable. A feat that may seem easy, but (as I’ve learned with recent reading) is not. We live in a world where extremes have become the norm a fact fiction seems to be trying to emulate and yet, even when things get messy in A Quiet Life, I was so invested in these characters and their situations that it was all relatable.

This is a gentle novel, but should not be mistaken for soft. It may be a quiet life it is not sweet. There’s no ease to either the situations or the resolution. Each is fraught with the deepest of human emotions, whether wanting to see where a beloved father died or the guilt left behind over a single argument. Joella gives each its full due and in doing so produces a novel that is both small and large in its reach. A Quiet Life is touching, lovely, and poignant, exactly the reading I needed to usher in the new year. Not unrealistic in its reach, but profound in the hope it invokes.

 

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