[In the following review, Dooley offers a negative assessment of A Lover's Almanac, criticizing the novel's lack of focus and cohesion.]

For more than 600 years, almanacs have been counting us through the calendar, helping us to calculate the position of the sun, moon and planets, entertaining us with feeble jokes, providing us with reminders of famous birthdays, cautioning that on such and such a day people in such and such an area will rise to find their world buried under snow. Once the almanac may have filled a need, but now it is a magpie collection of bright and shiny lore, a compendium of disparate information where everything stands alone and, wherever you chance to poke in your thumb, you'll pull out a plum.

And that is what Maureen Howard offers us in her new novel, A Lover's Almanac, with its collection of quotes, birthdays, astrological plotting, and stray bits of information patching together a love story firmly anchored to the end of the 20th century. There are so many voices, so many shiny bits of inessential information, so many things going on that the book never gets a firm hold on itself, never totally draws the reader in. The characters can't overcome the idea behind the book, can't climb over all the extraneous information that surrounds them and present themselves as real people.

Howard is a wonderful writer with a mind full of fabulous facts, and she lays them out for us to show the ways in which people slide by each other, bumping but never connecting. But to this end she spins out not one love story but two, three, four, until she has a book with so many hearts that ultimately it takes an entire art gallery to hold them. These hearts, symbols of all the loving and losing life has to offer, are placed in the gallery by Louise Moffett, whose latest conceptual art project is making a statement about marriage. With devastating concentration, she paints and piles thousands of shiny red hearts in a see-through vat, where gallery goers can grasp at them with a mechanical hand but can't remove them from their container. Like the lovers in Howard's novel, they can get hold of these alien hearts, but no one is able to keep them.

A Lover's Almanac is a paradigm for New York at the millennium, where the more pressing the crowds, the more precious the privacy—and the more people seek to seal themselves safely away. If even one person should break through the boundary, would we find ourselves overtaken by all?

Louise's lover, her dilemma, is Artie Freeman, a cybergoof who uses computers to hack out a paycheck and jokes to fend off the world. Born out of wedlock, he bears the burdensome name Freeman because his mother, refusing to tell him who his father was, had stripped him of the problems of a past. Naturally, Artie has devoted his life to finding the ties that will bind him in place.

Louise Moffett knows exactly what life she is fleeing, the rural world of Wisconsin where she was the farmer's daughter. Not just any farmer but a “global milkman, breeder of lactatious good will,” who has genetically created and then cloned “Dossie … Engineered for the new century, grazing arid land, she will produce 20,000 pounds of Product within the year.” With her art, Louise has attempted to dominate her past by first painting it in miniature and then creating pictures that dissect that rural world. Louise and Artie are a very modern pair, carefully casual about love, but they enter the millennium with the same problems lovers bore a thousand years ago.

There are many other voices in Howard's book: an old couple who met and parted many years ago, an aunt who briefly exchanges science for love and finds herself betrayed, a homeless child fantasizing affection, an assortment of steadfast wives, who stay on course out of habit rather than passion. There are even voices that float in out of nowhere, telling stories which seem to have no connection to anything that's gone before.

Among the many quotes Howard places throughout her almanac is this, from the philosopher William James: “The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds …”

Well, actually, we can when a novelist pulls them together for us, but Howard has chosen to follow James and let disunity define her tale. Even in the hands of a writer as gifted as she is, the material is overwhelming and the characters never entirely get free of it. Occasionally one story bumps into another, but no one is changed by the encounter or even aware that fate may have offered a footnote on the past or a different future. In A Lover's Almanac, Howard has written a book that is less about how people come together than about the many ways in which they stay apart.