The Midnight Library, Matt Haig, 2020
The story starts with the worst (and last) day of Nora Seed’s life. She’s 35 years old, living alone in an apartment in Bedford, England when an acquaintance from around town knocks on her door to let her know her cat is dead on the side of the road. All out of sorts, she is late to String Theory for work, the musical equipment store she’s been employed at for 12 years. She is then let go of because her boss notices she’s unhappy and thinks it’s time she move on; this is after he casually mentions that her brother came in the store a few days ago, but of course he didn’t visit her while in town—he hasn’t spoken to her in two years since she left their band and cost her brother his dream of being a rockstar.
To beg the issue further, on her way home she runs into his best friend Ravi (also in the ex-band) who blames her for why her brother wouldn’t want to see her. The icing on the cake is the piano appointment she realizes she’s missed when her student’s mom calls to let her know the kid may drop music altogether, and then her elderly neighbor tells her she no longer needs to pick up his medicine since he’s found someone else to do it. She feels completely useless and unneeded. She has no family. It’s rainy as hell outside. Her only solution is to overdose on pills and end her life.
I’d argue that the most powerful piece of this book is the easy transition with which she accepts death as the lesser of two evils. Her obstinate belief in suicide as being her best outcome is something she believes with such conviction that the reader believes it too. Her rationalization is that “she wasn’t made for this life.” And, truthfully, it shows. My point is that with only a touch of experience in this feeling, one can understand how she logically reaches a point of such abject despair.
Instead of death, however, she enters an “in-between” place which is conjured by her mind as an endless library, and is greeted by a symbolic Mrs. Elm, her kind middle school librarian. The figure of Mrs. Elm lets her know that people who die too soon with many regrets are able to have the opportunity to “try out” other lives until they find one which they want to continue their life from. If she doesn’t choose, she will of course die, but there are infinite possibilities, as each choice made sets up a pathway of new choices, which henceforth set up more pathways and more lives, and all she has to do is figure out which lives she’d like to try out.
There are the obvious lives, which directly come from undoing regrets—the one where she didn’t let her cat out, the one where she didn’t break off her engagement, the one where she became an Olympic swimmer, the one where she never left the band, the one where she became a glaciologist, etc. And then there are the less obvious ones, which don’t relate to a big regret of hers—the one where she said yes to the random coffee date, the one where she quietly works at an animal shelter, the one where she owns a winery, etc. She spends a span of a few hours to a few weeks in each of these lives, and she finds that (obviously) there is something wrong with each of them. In one, her brother had overdosed; in one, her marriage was miserable; in one, she hated fame. The list goes on.
A quick google search will show criticism for this book’s predictable ending. Nora decides (spoiler) she wants to return to her “root life,” and live. I, however, don’t believe the ending is the book’s big issue. In fact, in any fable, a predictable ending is sort of the point. We are reading it for a lesson. In this case, we’re looking something that will teach us to appreciate life (I chose to read this Thanksgiving weekend for that reason); for the protagonist to have a successful character arc, we expect she will go from suicidal to grateful.
My issue with the story, however, is how redundant it becomes. In every single life of Nora’s (and I believe there are nine), she has the exact same thoughts. Oh, this is great. Hmm, how do I act like I know what I’m talking about? Oh, wait, that’s strange. Oh, nevermind, this is awful.
And then, in one life, she has a near-death experience and decides she no longer wants to die. This is excusable—she’s gotten a change in perspective—but then it’s her hope which becomes redundant. The book becomes a series of platitudes about regret, which are beautiful for a reader to initially apply to themselves, but when they’re repeated more times than once, and given such a niche context, they lose their oomph and relatability.
There is one platitude toward the end about how sometimes life gives you an entirely new perspective if only you “[wait] around long enough…to see it,” which I see as the heart of the novel, and the most touching lesson. It directly addresses the issue of suicide (instead of dancing around it by undoing regrets, which are, at the end of the day, always going to be regrets), and is only said once it is clearly shown through the events at the end of the story.
I give this a 3/5 rating. It held my attention for the most part, but I found myself editing some of the sentence syntax (which is never a good sign) and choice of relevant details, and I’m not sure I felt too connected to Nora, nor any other character. It was the kind of thing that if I read a line too quickly, I didn’t feel compelled to reread it for full understanding, where many times I do.
I do, however, enjoy the perspective I took away from it, which is that I am just one of many possibilities of myself, and that all of my decisions should be intentional in bringing me toward the best outcome of myself.
Oh, and as a last little note, Nora had studied philosophy in college, and it is clear Haig studied philosophy as well because there were a lot of philosophical allusions which I think worked very well in the plot. At points, I felt like the novel was teaching me some basic philosophical theory, and I enjoyed that aspect a lot.
Trigger Warnings: Suicide, religion (sort-of)
Quotes:
But she’s been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
“I’m afraid, Nora,” – he paused for a moment, about the time it takes to lift an axe into the air – “I’m going to have to let you go.”
She finished the wine. All of it. “I miss you,” she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she’d loved were in the room with her.
On the street outside, the wind was getting stronger, howling through trees as if attempting a language.
“Dream big…You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.” She sipped her coffee. “I understand.”
