But there are a lot of books where you know how they're going to end, aren't there? Every tragedy, most comedies, and a whole lot of drama, especially in genre fiction. Sometimes I think that's what makes a book popular: that the average reader is confident they already know the ending, and relaxes to let the author deliver that to them.
The Midnight Library is an afterlife fantasy; it's probably Matt Haig's best-known and most popular novel. It was a Good Morning America book-club pick, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and has three pages of laudatory quotes at the beginning of the copy I read. It was also published in 2020, a year when I think a lot of people were not just looking for an uplifting book with a predictable ending, but one that let them think about all the different ways their lives could have gone.
Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, living in the provincial city of Bedford in England. She never became any of the things she at one point thought she might: not an Olympic-class swimmer, not the frontwoman of a famous rock band, not studying glaciers in Norway, not living with her best friend in sunny Australia, not married to the guy she practically left at the altar, not working in an animal shelter, not anything big, not anything impressive.
Instead, she has one weekly piano student (a teenage boy), she works in the local music shop, and that's about it.
One day, it all breaks. Her cat dies in the street. The music shop owner fires her. She forgets the lesson and loses her one student. Her never-husband sends pestering texts; her brother has stopped talking to her; her former best friend is living her best life in Australia. She decides she can't go on. She doesn't go on.
And she wakes up at the door of what seems to be an infinite library, where it is eternally midnight. Inside, she meets what seems to be Mrs. Elm, a librarian who was very kind to her as a child. And Mrs. Elm tells her the library is filled with books about Nora's life - one very heavy, very painful Book of Regrets, and an infinite number of green-covered stories of other lives. She can pick any one of the green books and fall into that life: if it's right for her, she'll settle in there and forget about the Midnight Library eventually. If it's not right, she'll bounce back and choose again.
Most of the book is made up of Nora going one by one through those major regrets and trying out the life where she did the thing: married Dan and helped run a rural pub, moved to Australia with her friend Izzy, kept swimming and entered the Olympics, stayed with the band and made it big, studied climatology and went to Svalbard with a research team, worked at the animal shelter instead of the music shop, agreed to a date with that nice surgeon who asked her once.
Of course, all of those lives have some good things about them. In a few, she's globally famous. In just about all of them, she's in a physically better place than her root life. But there's something wrong about all of them - her brother is dead, her relationship is sour, or she's just not that person after years of divergence. All of those lives are different because of a choice she made - but they're different in other ways, too. Her choices don't shape the whole world, just send her down different paths - she can't choose the perfect life, because it's not all down to her choices.
(You have probably figured out the ending by now, too. It is the obvious ending.)
She meets another jumper along the way, another person going through multiple lives. He's happy to have the infinite variety, and doesn't think he will ever pick one. Nora isn't happy with that idea, and also has been getting increasingly ominous warnings from Mrs. Elm when she bounces back: she probably can't keep going forever. In her root life, she's lying comatose in her grotty flat, suffering an overdose - time might not be moving in the Midnight Library, but it is moving somewhere, and eventually it will move enough that she will not be alive anymore.
The Book of Regrets gets smaller and lighter as she goes along and realizes she could have been unhappy in those other lives as well - maybe not as unhappy, maybe not unhappy in the same ways, but none of them are perfect.
And, eventually, Nora does need to choose the one life she will hold on to. And it is the one that it has to be.
I don't want to belabor the point: this is a very nice novel that ends nicely. Haig is positive and thoughtful, creating the kind of book that makes you feel happier when you're done - which is often denigrated in literary circles. It is maybe more than a little bit obvious, but many of the best lessons in life are obvious: we all know we're supposed to sit up straight, treat others as we want to be treated, and eat our vegetables. Midnight Library is like that.
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