Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
I do not understand the people who read melancholy books with protagonists who are depressed. To me, the point of fiction is enjoyment and I don’t enjoy books about people who start and end miserably.
When I started “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, I almost quit because I wasn’t sure it was a good time for me to read a book about someone who associates herself mentally with Sylvia Plath. But I also saw where the book was going and I like “It’s a Wonderful Life” so I gave it a chance. I’m glad I did, because while it’s not a perfect book by the end the ideas in the book had began to resonate with me and some points are excellent.
What is “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig about?
As a character study, the book is superficial about Nora. Nora is about 35 and so focused on her regrets in life that she tries to kill herself. But when she does, she wakes up in a library that holds an infinite amount of books, each of those books is a life she could have led. But while this is certainly the plot of the book, I say it’s superficial about that because this is a book that both explores a single character and unapologetically explores the philosophy and the way many of us live our lives.
The bulk of the book has Nora visiting different lives. The librarian who looks and acts like her school librarian explains that if she finds a life, she truly wants to live she will meld into that life gaining the memories of that life and largely forgetting the other life and the library as little more than an odd dream. But for most of the story, she goes into worlds that are clearly flawed. Some of these seem entirely natural, like discovering than a marriage to a man she had almost married isn’t happy. Others felt as if the flaw felt a bit forced. But all of that was to serve a singular point, one most of us forget. That point is that no life is perfect. That the people who look like they have it all together often as not are putting on a show and that is true of the other lives you could have led as well. They’re easy to imagine as better, but that’s because it’s fantasy, not reality.
The climatic life is one in which everything seems nearly perfect. Nora goes into a life where she is married to a kind man and has a daughter that she loves even before she begins to have the memories of her previous life return. She has her dream job, a good relationship with her brother and more. And as she spends more time, she begins to sink into that life, remembering bits and pieces of it from before she was there. But all the time something minor is bothering her. She hadn’t really earned it. Some other version of herself had done all the work to get there and combined with a trip to her own home to see the people who she had helped just by living the life that she had disliked so much she had tried to end her life she understands it wasn’t as pointless as she had believed.
Finally, she returns to her beginning life. The one that she had attempted to overdoes in. She rushes out and gets help and survives. But the real point is the change in her perspective. Her life hasn’t actually changed. She had lost her job, lost her cat, and was as alone as before. But she now saw the possibilities. The value that she could bring to the world through little things.
It still seems like she’d miss the kid from the other reality, though.
What I thought of “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig
I like the message of “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, and the writing and pacing is good to excellent. And while there were a couple of weak plot points, part of that comes from having to create a dozen different lives for the same character. Not all of them are likely to be perfect. And while there are no major flaws, it simply never quite rose to the level of greatness that others seem to see in it. Perhaps it was because I saw within the first fifteen pages exactly where the story was going so wasn’t surprised, or perhaps it was because many of the dreams and regrets didn’t really match all that well with my own and so didn’t feel as real.
Perhaps it’s even because the mental health and feeling were both too close and too different from the way I feel, so that I felt some depths more acutely while not feeling enough of the triumph. In the end I liked the book quite a lot, and I think for the right person it could be great, but for me it was simply good.