Maureen Corrigan

A puzzling separation from his beloved adult son is one cause, but there's also Artie's low-level feeling of isolation.

For instance, arriving home after a cocktail party, Artie says to his wife Evie, I wonder why people never said anything real.

Evie, a therapist, dismissively tells him not to be an idiot.

We're told that Artie, as he walked to the closet with their coats, felt a dismalness return to him.

There's a major secret revealed in the course of this story.

And Artie's special area of interest, American Civil War history, allows the novel to make some profound commentary about our own contemporary civil wars.

But Strout readers know her most overwhelming epiphanies sneak up in throwaway moments, fragmented short paragraphs.

I'll leave you with one of those paragraphs, courtesy of Strout's omniscient narrator.

So blind we humans are, so blind, to each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone.

And maybe we have.

But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another's selves, including our own, thinking all the while that we can see.

Sometimes girls just want to have fun, right?

I've been in a springtime mood of wanting to dive into a cartoon-colored ball pit of comic novels with spunky heroines.

And I found some good ones.

But what I also found is that much like the classic screwball comedies of yore, escapism in these playful novels links arms with edgy social commentary.

Yesteryear, an intricately plotted debut novel by Carol Clare Burke, has been getting lots of attention, and deservedly so.

The main character here is an online trad wife named Natalie Heller Mills.

On camera, Natalie revels in activities like spending four hours making a loaf of sourdough bread and then adorning it with a nativity scene made out of herbal stick figures from her own garden naturally.

A little of this goes a long way for those of us who share the attitude of the late Joan Rivers.

Rivers famously quipped, I hate housework.