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Random Hearts
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Survivors of a tragic plane crash seek both meaning and
closure to the discovery of their dead spouses' infidelity.
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First
Editions
by Alden Whitman
It is a
puzzlement as to how people meet one another and how men and women sort out
friendship and love from their many acquaintances. This mystery is at the
heart of Warren Adler's fine and readable novel, Random
Hearts, a sensitive examination not only of the luck factor in
bringing people together but also of the effects of infidelity on its victims.
With a deftness I had not thought possible, Adler tells the gripping story of
Edward Davis and Vivien Simpson, who are brought together by a police report
that their spouses had been killed in a plane crash and that they had been
having an affair. At first disbelieving and shattered, Edward and Vivien
gradually turn to each other to try to decipher the past and their failed
marriages. By talking, they learn about each other and ultimately fall in
love. Adler is keenly aware of the psychological aspects of their
relationships, and this helps to give his novel its verisimilitude and its
capacity to hold the reader to the very end.
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Washington
Post Book World
After a
stunning shocker of an opener-an airplane taking off in a snowstorm from
Washington crashes, killing all aboard but four - this novel becomes all too
predictable. Aboard the plane were a man and woman very much in love and very
much marries, but not to each other. They have been very careful in arranging
to get away by themselves for a few days before telling their marital partners
about the divorces they want. The woman has just discovered she's pregnant.
The rejected husband and wife have absolutely no inkling that anything has
gone wrong in their marriages. This is a little hard to believe in itself.
Writing
very smoothly, Adler takes us step by step through the recovery of bodies from
the plane and their identification to the inevitable revelation to Edward
Davis and Vivien Simpson that they have been cuckolded by their dead wife and
husband.
From the
time that Edward and Vivien meet, however, anyone but the most naïve reader
will know what lies ahead for them. Their determined pursuit of the room in
which the dead Orson and Lily secretly coupled seems hardly important and
maybe even a little bit sick. Aided by Sergeant McCarthy of the Metropolitan
Police homicide squad, who acts as a cross between a fairy godmother and a deus
ex machina, they do find it, however, and then all comes right in their
world.
The
quality of the writing in Random Hearts is
good. The plotting, however, is, alas, totally foreseeable, and to tell the
truth Edward and Vivien (especially Edward) seem such twerps that it is very
easy to see why their mates looked elsewhere.
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