A Broken-Hearted Heroine Picks Up The Pieces In Jojo Moyes' 'After You'

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The best-selling 2012 novel, "Me Before You," by British novelist Jojo Moyes, is being made into a film set to come out this spring. Meanwhile, Moyes has written a sequel to that novel called "After You," that's out this week. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says Moyes sure knows how to tell a story.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Writer Jojo Moyes has a name that lacks gravitas. To be honest, I even feel a bit silly saying her name when I recommend her novels to people, which I do, often and energetically. It's hard to imagine a Jojo ever winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But Moyes has already won a pretty good consolation prize - that is, the kind of staunch, adoring readership that will follow her novels anywhere they go. Moyes writes those kind of big, twisting, romance-y stories about women, often working-class, who are distinguished not so much by beauty or cultural capital but by their pluck and indestructible sense of humor. Typically, a Moyes heroine finds herself in a jam. She's in a dead-end job, or she's exhausted by caretaking demands. Or she's fallen for the wrong person and suffers humiliation and loneliness. Then, with a lot of bumbling perseverance, she manages to make it through. The mother of invention for this kind of plot, albeit in a more highbrow form, was Jane Austen. And by the way, last year, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of Austen's "Mansfield Park," one of the most famous tales about women bumbling their way through to a sense of self-worth and happiness. Susan Isaacs and the late Maeve Binchy are more recent masters of this genre, while Moyes is one of the younger writers, brilliantly carrying forward this women-in-trouble comedy romance tradition. In 2012, Moyes brought out a novel called "Me Before You" that became an international bestseller. It told the story of Louisa, Lou, Clark, a young woman who lives with her parents in a quaint English village and works at a cafe near the local tourist attraction, a castle. Lou is such a vibrant presence. She's observant and wryly funny. She's also a goofball who dresses in vintage clothes and bumblebee tights. In short, Lou seems full of life. And yet, something is clearly holding her back. We readers eventually learn what that traumatic something is. Without a university degree or any kind of training beyond high school, Lou's job options are limited. So when she hears about a well-paying position caring for a young man named Will Traynor, who's been injured and is now a quadriplegic, she takes it despite the fact that at her job interview, Will tries to frighten her off by impersonating the Daniel Day-Lewis character in "My Left Foot." Lou falls in love with Will and he with her. But the kicker is that Will is more in love with the idea of ending a life he finds unbearable. "After You," as its title suggests, delves into what Emily Dickinson called, the hour of lead. It's a novel that explores how very miserable it is to try to go on living after the death of a loved one. "Me Before You" ended with Lou in Paris, trying to follow Will's postmortem command to just live well; just live. In the opening of the sequel, we find out that Lou has made a mess of things. With a bequest from Will, Lou woodenly traveled around Europe alone and was depressed. She made herself buy an apartment in London, where she lives alone and is depressed. She's fallen back into the kind of job she knew and is now working as a barmaid at a faux Irish pub at the airport. There, she fends off drunks, cleans the toilets and wears a Lorax-green costume and red wig that makes her look like a porno pixie. As she tells us, Lou suffers through many weeks that, as if in response to a maligned dog whistle, just go downhill. Be assured, there are plot twists aplenty here and moments of silliness and the arrival of unexpected characters who help Lou lift herself up again. But overall, "After You" is a more muted, riskier novel than its predecessor. Think Elizabeth Bennet after Darcy's eventual death, Alice after Gertrude, Wilbur after Charlotte. The aftermath is a subject most writers understandably avoid. But Moyes has tackled it and given readers an affecting, even entertaining female adventure tale about a broken heroine who ultimately rouses herself and falls in love again, this time with the possibilities in her own future.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "After You" by Jojo Moyes. If you want to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, including last week's interview with comic Jim Gaffigan, who talked about how being Catholic figures into his standup and his TV series, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews to choose from. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.