Book Review

By Derryll White

Sullivan, Matthew (2017).  Midnight At the Bright Ideas Bookstore.

Matthew Sullivan worked for years at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and at Brookline Booksmith in Boston. I work in a bookstore.  All of us, the entire staff as well as the cat, are aware that we are not normal.  Maybe it is the weight of all the work and ideas on the shelves, or the impressive quirks of our regular customers – whatever.  We accept it as our place in the world, outside the norm.

Lydia is like that.  She is the central character in this novel, knows she is not normal and uses that knowledge to create a life for herself.  There is a beautiful piece about her mother dying in childbirth and Lydia, the newborn, rescuing her father Tomas from the depths of despair.  It reveals, early in the story, Matthew Sullivan’s strong capability as a writer.

The author uses his own personal history to inform his work.  “Those experiences were enormously influential on the person I became and, obviously, on the setting for this novel.”

This is a good read.  ‘Midnight At the Bright Ideas Bookstore’ will leave all true readers believing bookstores are sanctuaries, places to stop the world, escape from COVID-19, and there to wander the halls of their own private memories and desires.

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Excerpts from the novel:

AMERICA – “Believe me,” he said, smiling.  “It only got worse once you were gone.  They were so worried about me, and my mom talked about not being able to live in America anymore, it was too violent, all that.”  Ray shifted into his mom’s soft voice, no accent, but with long drawn-out vowels.  “People here are crazy, Ray!”

BOOKSTORES – Lydia had learned early on at Bright Ideas that stepping back here ensured an amplification of both intelligence and surliness.  Many of her backstage comrades were bibliophiles who’d been so disappointed by people that they now sought as little human interaction as possible.  Other comrades disappeared backstage gradually, one shift at a time, when their faces hurt from smiling too much and they could no longer take responsibility for what they might do to the next person who asked for directions to the bathroom.

DENVER – Between gaps in the skyline Lydia could see the dark form of the distant mountains where Ray was trying to steer her.  From this vantage the Rockies appeared as a spiky black wall, majestic and fearful, a remnant of an ancient time.  She felt she understood those early roaming Denverites who’d hit that wall and couldn’t take another step, so they stabbed some buildings into the prairie, rolled out some railroad tracks, and began their century of sprawl.  It was so much easier to stay put.

BOOKS – When he paused in front of her books – each one a dusty time capsule of the hours she’d spent within it – Lydia grew self-conscious of her secondhand shelves, doubled up with books, some tripled, and the sight of them left her feeling obsessive and antisocial.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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