The Last Blind Date by Linda Yellin, promises to be an unromantic love story, the tale of a later-in-life romance between a widow in Chicago and a divorced man in Manhattan. It is, I realize a few pages in, not a novel at all, but the author’s account of meeting, falling in love with and marrying her husband, and the story does not end with a fairy-tale wedding, but with the affectionate melding of two full lives.
The Last Blind Date sparkles with the warmth and honesty of the best blogs. Sometimes, though, in reading certain blogs, I feel like an awkward voyeur into unwitting secondary characters’ lives. And here it was hard to enjoy the sulky stepdaughter, touchy-feely in-laws, and the trashy wedding of an overage bride (note: not the narrator) while I felt awkwardly like a friend was oversharing.
I felt much less guilty enjoying the portrayal of dramatically Manhattan coworkers. Each description of falling in love with the frenetic, hostile, fascinating city of Manhattan is a delight to read, pitch-perfect with the addiction of New York life. Yellin describes a trip thought Penn Station, which resonated particularly strongly since it’s part of my own frenetic commute to my own midtown office:
Grey, cavernous Penn Station with its creepy fluorescent lighting. If I were Pennsylvania, I would insist New York take my name off the door. The station’s big focal point is a colossal digital sign suspended overhear. I don’t know who’s running the show up there, but clearly they’re having scads of fun. The sign is for listing departure gates, but somehow the gates never get posted until three minutes before departure time, a scenario designed to result in a New York buffalo stampede.
Readers might expect the romantic storyline to be the crux of the book, but instead, this is where the book falls short. The romantic lead, simply, isn’t. While each anecdote she tells is hilarious when taken by itself, from the charming way he accidentally introduces her by his first wife’s name, to the charming way he confuses his two wedding anniversaries, the overall story presents a thoroughly unlikeable romantic lead. What I expected to be a later-in-life love story, an often overlooked but brilliant topic, becomes a worrying narrative of a woman who hung around long enough, making few enough demands on a self-absorbed man, that she eventually convinced him to marry her and let her give up her job, friends and home city. And as the narration felt more and more like I’d been chatting with a friend, I wondered unpleasantly whether my dear girlfriend was really as happy as she claimed.
I expected an unusual, understated love story in The Last Blind Date, and I found it, not in the boy-meets-girl storyline, but in a Yellin’s lovely valentine to the awkward, delightful assimilation into New York life.