This is your life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison

In the mid-fifties, Ralph Edwards hosted a popular TV show that foreshadowed reality TV – guests on the show, often well-known, but not always, were surprised on camera with a recounting of their lives complete with appearances from long-lost childhood friends, family, old colleagues, etc.  Using this device, the author recounts, back and forth in time, the life of Harriet Chance, nee Nathan.  The only child of a doting father and demanding mother, she is now 78.  Bernard, her husband of over fifty years has recently died after precipitously declining into Alzheimer’s, but somehow he keeps popping up and engaging her in conversation.  Her adult children are worried, and their worry increases when she decides to go an Alaskan cruise that she recently learned Bernard had purchased at a charity auction the year before.  The framing device fails to make the book much more interesting than Harriet’s rather conventional life.  The surprises that are revealed to her in her 79^th year are primarily unhappy ones.  The book is billed as a “lovely, forgiving character study,” but I actually thought it a bit cruel to the main character.  Not my cup of tea.  296 pp.