REVIEW:

I’ll admit, the standard was pretty high when I picked up Katherine Heiny’s debut novel after recently reading and ADORING her latest, Early Morning Riser. So did Standard Deviation live up to it? Yes and no.

Here we follow a slice-of-life, low-stakes plot about a real assbite of a husband who’s suffering a bit of malaise and evaluating if his quirky younger second wife is better for him than his first one. He cheated on Wife 1 with Wife 2, and now he’s contemplating a throwback affair with Wife 1. Charming.

He and Wife 2 also have a son with Asperger’s, whose standard deviation from the norm is the source of the title, and whose obsession with origami is the source of the cover art.

While I didn’t necessarily gel with these characters, I still loved Heiny’s comfortable and casually humorous writing style. She crafts a certain kind of dramedy that fills a gap between chick lit and serious literary fiction. It’s a gap I need to fall into every once in awhile, and here’s hoping more readers discover Heiny’s books and join me.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

The celebrated author of Single, Carefree, Mellow, returns with her debut novel - a rueful, funny examination of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami.

Graham Cavanaugh's second wife, Audra, is everything his first wife was not. Audra is charming and spontaneous and fun, but life with her can be exhausting, constantly interrupted by phone calls, burdened by houseguests, and populated by old men with backpacks full of origami paper. As Graham and Audra struggle to define their marriage and raise a child with Asperger's, they decide to establish a friendship with his first wife, Elspeth. But former spouses are hard to categorize - are they friends, enemies, old flames, or just people who know you really, really well? Graham starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did he make the right choice? Is there a right choice? A novel as poignant as it is hilarious, Standard Deviation never deviates from superb.