For Your Reading Pleasure...

Summer days bring thoughts of relaxation and getting lost in the pages of a good book. It’s not hard to slide into the smooth writing of Nicholas Sparks. The author is a gifted storyteller. He first showed this in The Notebook, a short novel about two young people who search for their true love. The narration comes from an older man, Noah Calhoun, who tells the story—his story—in the hope of eliciting a fleeting moment of recollection from his wife Allie, suffering from memory loss due to Alzheimer's.

Although we see Noah face his lifelong love’s declining mental state, the story does not focus on the devastation that is Alzheimer’s. Instead, The Notebook is a love story. It is a story of infatuation, longing, second chances, and true devotion. Sparks, who some may find overly sentimental, evokes the purest essence of love—a love that few will find no matter how long they search.

And, love is easy to talk about when it involves attractive lovers. Indeed, protagonist Noah may be the ideal man in many women’s eyes. He’s a handsome, intelligent, rugged, soft-spoken gentleman who has a laborer’s hands and a poet’s sense of romance. He kayaks each morning, rebuilds a house during the day, and cooks at night. Almost perfect, right? Ah, but here’s the catch: Noah is from a blue-collar, small town background. This may not be a problem for some, but Noah falls hard for Allie Nelson—and Allie is another beautiful romantic, but a romantic raised in the comfort and expectation of a prominent Southern family. Class conflict is not a new theme but Sparks’ story works. He uses the difference in status as the challenge that keeps his lovers separate and yearning for the wholeness that only each can bring one another.

Separation runs throughout the story. An older Noah, thinking of his wife’s lost memory, watches out the window as day turns into night. “There cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time,” he says. “How would it feel, I remember wondering, to be always together, yet forever apart?”

Noah and Allie’s love for one another never wanes though circumstances and class status keep them apart. And, later, after these obstacles have been hurdled, the memory-robbing Alzheimer’s threatens to pull the mature lovers apart though they physically exist together.

Sparks is not Hemingway. Whereas the famed Nobel Prize winner was known for his “tip of the iceberg” style (where he gave the reader a minimal amount of emotion), Sparks antes up all of Antarctica. His prose, gently written, exudes feeling. Noah’s and Allie’s thoughts and emotions are spelled out thought by thought, leaving little to the imagination of the reader. Some may consider the Sparks’ approach sappy and overdone. Others will find the honest, straightforward writing easy and enjoyable to read.

The Notebook doesn’t delve deeply into Alzheimer’s disease. Still, the reader witnesses the dramatic loss of memory through Noah’s passionate eyes. Not surprisingly, the sections about Alzheimer’s are melancholic, the reality of the disease even sadder. But again, The Notebook doesn’t carry despair as its principal cargo. Rather, soulful love is packed throughout the quick-turning pages.

On the second page of the novel, Noah writes, “I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.” It’s also enough to make The Notebook worth reading.

Do you have a book you’d like to recommend to the elder and caregiving community? We’d like to hear about it. Please e-mail us at books@mves.org.