The reckoning of middle age in a new novel

It can be an effort to surrender oneself to the hands of a novelist, to give oneself over to the world on the page. So when it happens immediately, when one slips into a place, an atmosphere, a mind as effortlessly as falling through space, it is worth taking note. Such is the case with the work of novelist Ellen Cooney. Her new novel, “A Cowardly Woman No More” (Coffee House), lands us in the middle of Massachusetts, where Wachusett “stood alone on the flat horizon, like a dinosaur, gorgeous out the windows of the Rose & Emerald banquet hall,” and in the mind of a woman in her middle age. The book unspools, with grace, humor, and perceptive depth, over the course of a single ordinary, extraordinary day. It is, in part, an office novel, and Cooney nails the soul-dulling absurdity of certain working lives. And it is, in part, a much stranger and more magical thing. Trisha Donahue has been passed over for a promotion; a less qualified younger man gets the job. It forces a reckoning, a face-to-face with the quiet seethe that can only be ignored for so long. “I could talk myself into believing that nothing mattered except being professional and also very good at what you do.” On the day of the annual company banquet, a series of events takes place involving a comet, unexpected visitors from the past, memories, and revelations. Cooney’s great skill as we press against the limits of the real is that we are with her in every moment; her language is unshowy, matter-of-fact, human, and she is also open — and opens us — to the inexplicable, the wild magic, the stuff we can’t make sense of all the way.