[In the following review, Simon offers a positive assessment of A Lover's Almanac, noting its stylistic similarities to Natural History.]

About your arcade. You do see the pathos and pretension of the great Parisian arcades popping up in Bridgeport—your little glassed-over alley!

—Maureen Howard, Natural History

Once celebrated as a hallmark of America's cheery future, its robust inner health, the suburb has fallen from grace. No longer do aluminum siding, pink shutters and identically plotted lawns signal comfort and ease. These are the trappings of the Doll House (as in “Welcome to …”), the setting for key parties and other signs of marital decadence and cultural malaise. The Bradys are not a happy memory of family blending, before race, gender and Reaganomics got in the way; they are a symbol of our collective delusion. What we thought was success was really melanoma—a sunspot that's rotten underneath.

But with crime on the wane and the squeegee people in jail, the city is picking up where the suburbs left off. Even television, arguably our most accommodating cultural medium, has ventured forth with gusto into the urban jungle. The Friends frolic in Central Park, Susan has suddenly become herself in San Francisco and loads of sexy, eligible Chicago doctors kiss each other under the el and jog along Lake Michigan; only once in a blue moon do they get mugged or caught in the crossfire of drug-infested neighborhoods. More often, television cities—like movie cities and the cities of political campaigns—are stimulating, hopeful places where white people have black friends and sometimes you meet someone who teaches you something. Even cop shows seem to flaunt the benignity of the city's ills: Unlike angst, alienation and anomie, murders and robberies can be solved, their perpetrators punished.

Maureen Howard has long been a champion of the glorious city—even when the cities she was writing about seemed, on the surface at least, rather unlovely. A native of Bridgeport, Howard often sets her stories in the crucible of urban Connecticut, where, if they linger long enough, every Pilgrim meets a millhand, a machine Boss and a mallrat. The peculiar economy of Connecticut—some of the nation's richest suburbs pitted with some of its poorest cities—has become for Howard a stage on which to set grand, sweeping novels, novels where the past is the only weapon available to fight the future. Bridgeport Bus, reissued recently by Penguin, is the byword for her particular brand of urban irony, for the ways splendor fades into decay. For those who lived in the milltowns along the Housatonic, the bus to Bridgeport was once a transport of hope; now, its alliterative promise is a joke, a fare to Nowhere.

Howard's Natural History, which appeared in 1992, is both a paean to Bridgeport and a meditation on the accretions of urban life. Ostensibly the story of a Fairfield County detective, Billy Bray, and his family, Natural History swings from the starved fields of Ireland to the Hollywood hills as Bray's descendants—his daughter, Catherine, his son, James, and his granddaughter, Jen—puzzle with the pieces of Bray's life. As in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Bray's offspring draw us into the web of their own fallible truths. We get a remarkably tactile vision of Bridgeport in the forties—Billy in a brown fedora; a sexy murder suspect with silk stockings and a war-hero husband; an old Irish neighborhood where the Brays, their big house inherited from Nell Bray's made-good parents, are both too much and not enough. And we get a remarkably stark portrait of contemporary Bridgeport, which Catherine Bray can neither leave nor embrace (she lives in the suburbs, not yet stained by the muddy excavations of Hollywood), and to which James Bray returns in an aborted effort to make a movie of his father's life. Along the way, Howard treats us to excursions: visits with P. T. Barnum, the ghost of Bridgeport's prosperous past, the guiding spirit of industrial hokum; the musings of Aaron Burr, Samuel Clemens and the Roman alphabet, in which Y is the final letter that matters.

What we do not get is the facts about Billy Bray—what he thought, where he went on those evenings when he was investigating the murder of a young soldier by a woman whose husband was overseas. Howard's bricolage takes on a logic of its own, a compendium of family memory and urban folklore. Toward the end of the book, we meet Walter Benjamin in small print, and in Howard's introduction to his “Arcades” project, we find some of the wisdom of her ways. “Benjamin,” she writes, “expected no less than to alter our relation to the page, to let us shop, that's the whimsy, through his chosen topics and cultural totems; to rifle the bins of ‘Dream City,’ ‘Museum.’”

And so, in a celebration of the possibilities of modern life, we shop through Natural History (nature's story)—for the Bridgeport story that makes sense to us, for the bits we'd like to keep. We know only the barest facts absolutely—Billy, Nell, their names, occupations, paternity. Everything else carries with it the surreal aura of movieland props: a hovering urban smog, the fixed smile of a shop-window mannequin. Howard's Bridgeport, like Barnum's, is subtle, gallant pastiche.

It is a question for the ages whether people who live in cities envy country people as much as they say they do.

—The Old Farmer's Almanac, 1998

Despite its urban busyness, Natural History has a strong connection to a rural world. Its title gestures toward the enterprise of historical study—the “natural” layering of events—but it also gestures toward a primal moment, a time before the city became itself and lost its agricultural memory. Indeed, like the suburbs that are the uncanny spawn of rural expanse and urban industry, Natural History occupies a space between worlds. Between literary genres as well: If Natural History owes a debt to Benjamin's “Arcades,” it owes one too to Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, another project of observation and classification created for the casual perusal of acquisitive customers.

Howard's latest novel, A Lover's Almanac, owes similar debts. It too is the product of a rural genre—The Farmer's Almanac—claimed for the telling of a quintessentially urban tale, the loft-based love of a New York City couple, Louise Moffett, a painter, and Artie Freeman, a conflicted designer of market messages. The romantic chronicle of Lou and Artie, who when we meet them are separating after five years, is punctuated by zodiac dials, homey proverbs, charts detailing the “Remarkable Days” had by January, February, March. Howard has magnified the tiny historical markers found in The Farmer's Almanac, so that Louise, Artie, their friends and families share narrative space with Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Adams and Ann Lee, celibate mother of the Shakers. As in Natural History, Howard has amplified the micro-story of her characters, placed them in the shadows of the world stage, where the lighting is good and the sets spectacular. Sandwiched between “The Flintstones” and “The Celebrated Soup,” William James explains the magnetic pull of the Almanac's narrative, its effect as novel, history and exercise in humanity. “The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another,” he tells us, “but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own.”

This is exactly what Louise Moffett and Artie Freeman are doing when we first meet them, at a New Year's Eve party they have thrown to greet the millennium: December 31, 1999. In grasping for a theme, Louise and Artie have settled upon the early fifties. Their party is part millennial frenzy, part domestic fantasy: guests in satin thrift-store party dresses doing the cha-cha and nibbling on Ritz crackers spread with spread; Artie in his grandfather's Korean War uniform, his hair freshly buzzed. Drunk, he botches his marriage proposal to Lou and is ejected from the party, exiled from her life. The story that follows is both reunion journey and zodiac-managed time travel, for before Lou and Artie can join the march into the twenty-first century, they must first make peace with the twentieth. Nostalgia is one thing, history another.

Hobbled by yearning for another decade—a decade when the trajectory of their love would have been obvious, marriage and babies following professional establishment for him and renunciation for her—Artie and Lou are displaced people. Lou has left behind the Wisconsin farm of her youth, where her ambitious father lavishes attention on his cloned cow, Dossie. And Artie is equally estranged from his origins, for though he cares deeply for the grandfather who raised him, he has never met the father who sired him. His mother, out of defiance, named her son “Freeman,” distancing him from both his own origins and herself. Louise's art dealer cynically praises her generation—“so adept at appropriation”—but we know from the start that he's wrong. True appropriation might satisfy, but used clothing does not.

Alternatively, Howard solicits our sympathy: “Born into Generation X 1/2 or Y, into the willed innocence at the end of a century, they have lived without a war … without poverty to give them just cause.” Artie and Lou, for the moment, are living on borrowed traumas, the unnutritious aspirations of another place and time.

It is appropriate, then, that their story is told through the medium of a displaced genre, the homiletic tone of the Almanac overlaying both the byzantine twists of Howard's prose and the urban chaos of Lou's and Artie's lives. What saves Lou and Artie is a combination of theatrical emotion—Love! Valour! Compassion!—and simple cosmography: Like the grateful Shakers who danced for Ann Lee, Artie and Lou come down where they ought to be. Ultimately, it is the persistence of the Almanac that comes to their rescue—its conviction that order can be imposed on the whims of nature, that prediction and understanding are not, despite the warnings of theorists, zealots and random cynics, completely outside our grasp. Following the natural wisdom of Poor Richard, Louise and Artie learn that love can be alternately fertile and barren. Love, like history, has seasons.