Divorce can appear almost routine--an expected life stage--from the outside. Jane McCafferty's First You Try Everything, an arresting case study of a disintegrating relationship, uses an insider perspective to show how the splitting of conjoined lives can seem like the world itself rent in two. Evvie and Ben were outside-the-mainstream kindred souls in their 20s, the kind of urbanites who owned a food cart and eschewed the daily grind of the straight life. But now, as they've hit middle age, Ben has found fulfillment in an office job and Evvie's mood swings and her lost-cause obsessions grate on him. Evvie, for her part, can feel Ben slipping away but can't fathom the concept of separation from her soul mate until she is tragically forced to confront reality.
McCafferty's astonishing accomplishment is to flesh out, in alternating perspectives, the panic, the hope (and false hope) and the ways a shared history brings a couple like Ben and Evvie both intimacy and suffocation as they approach diverging paths. Once the reader has absorbed the universal nature of the couples' dilemma, McCafferty shifts her laser-like focus to their uniqueness, delving into the childhood pain that makes a normal life attractive to Ben and the quirky instability that makes Evvie choose a radical, outrageous plan to win Ben back.
First You Try Everything is a deeply felt, harrowing novel and a thought-provoking reminder that, as commonplace as divorce has become, an oft-occurring tragedy is a tragedy nonetheless. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic