The Regrets

Starred review from November 25, 2019
Bonnaffons’s wonderful debut novel (after the collection The Wrong Heaven) is a tale of ghostly love and passion. Thomas Barrett has died, but there has been an “institutional error,” and he’s been returned to Earth for 90 days to live an odd pseudo-life until they—whoever “they” are—can receive him. He’s given guidelines that explain how he can reduce the possibility of regrets while he awaits death, such as avoiding connections with his previous life and resisting sexual contact. Thomas respects the advice until he meets Rachel Starr, a young librarian he first spots in a New York coffee shop. Rachel is drawn to Thomas, too, and they become intensely involved during Thomas’s final weeks. However, Thomas begins to have episodes of fading, first with large holes temporarily appearing in his body, and then an overall increasing insubstantiality. As Thomas’s days on Earth wind down, the two bittersweetly make the most of their time together. The tension of an ephemeral romance and impending loss will keep readers turning the pages, and the luminous prose is vibrant with penetrating observations, whether about moments that are a “crucial node in the universe’s vast plan” or about dying—with or without regrets. This sexy, witty novel about life, death, and love’s power will enchant readers. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

November 15, 2019
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man. Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. "I have fallen in love with my own daydreams," she explains, "and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men." But the men disappoint, in the end. "It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream," she says, but rather that the men were too weak to "withstand the daydream's reality." And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, "like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey," and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. ("Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging," she observes, in one of the book's many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an "institutional error"--the institution being death--he is "insufficiently dead" and so must be temporarily "re-manifested," returned to a body that "exactly resembles" his own until "the Office" is able to "complete the procedures necessary to process" his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. "Sexual contact" is not advised in this state; it is "the most efficient way to incur regrets." And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be--that should be--unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons' (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment. Deep and deeply funny.

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November 1, 2019
This tight and lyrical debut novel follows the flawed members of a sticky love triangle. Thomas is dead, more specifically a half-dead apparition. Rachel has never felt fulfilled by a lover, and Mark is one of her dorky ex-boyfriends. When Rachel meets Thomas, she is enchanted by his ethereal and fleeting nature. She falls fast, and is rightfully terrified when she finds literal holes in Thomas' body?holes that grow daily until Thomas is a totally unbodied spirit. Thomas' invisibility doesn't stop the runaway train of their hot and heavy affair?he makes love to her all day long, unseen by the world around. Unfortunately, this ghost-honeymoon phase doesn't last. Rachel is soon suffocated by the constant contact, which is, conveniently, exactly when dull Mark steps back into the picture to help halt her haunting. Bonnaffons (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) has a deft hand for dialogue and character development, which grounds the fantastical nature of her novel in the sharp truths of real-life love and desire. Perfect for fans of Melissa Broder's The Pisces.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2019

Intrigued by the misty-eyed young man she always sees at a Brooklyn bus stop, Rachel sits down to chat--and discovers a magnetically attractive soul who happens to be dead. Thomas is stuck on Earth for 90 days owing to a heavenly snafu, and he's not supposed to associate with the living. Now what? A first novel with a 50,000-copy first printing, and going by the success of Bonnaffons's debut story collection, the sometimes wacky, sometimes touching, always surprising The Wrong Heaven, it should be good.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2020

DEBUT On page one of Bonnaffons's wildly imaginative debut novel (following an acclaimed story collection, The Wrong Heaven), the demise of 26-year-old Thomas Barrett goes seriously awry when his Angel of Death, sent to fetch him, realizes she's made a terrible mistake. Thomas finds himself insufficiently dead and facing the Officer of the afterlife, who explains that Thomas must return to Earth for three months in his former body while corrections are made. Thomas is given a list of rules he is encouraged to follow in order to avoid regrets, with sexual contact especially discouraged. So of course Thomas finds himself irresistibly attracted to Rachel, a beautiful, quirky librarian he meets at a bus stop. They embark on a passionate, obsessive relationship that presents extraordinary challenges when Thomas slips into invisibility, body part by body part. Enter Mark, Rachel's old college boyfriend, who is literally caught between Rachel and her ghost lover. VERDICT Bonnaffons raises many provocative questions about human relationships in the 21st century, particularly the urgent search for intimacy that ironically is so often sabotaged by endless casual encounters. Spicy hot, impish, and not without its moments of poignancy and, yes, regrets. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.