Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

About the author

Ann Napolitano is the bestselling author of Hello Beautiful which was selected as Oprah’s 100th Book Club pick; Dear Edward, an instant New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna selection, and an Apple TV+ series; A Good Hard Look, and Within Arm’s Reach. For seven years, Napolitano was the associate editor of the literary magazine One Story, and she received an MFA from New York University. She has taught fiction writing at Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, and Gotham Writers Workshop.

Review

It’s Like ‘Little Women’ — but With Basketball. In “Hello Beautiful,” Ann Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic story of four sisters. Bruce Holsinger, March 11, 2023. New York Times

“It is your God-given right as an American fiction writer,” Ursula K. Le Guin once said, to change point of view. But “you need to know that you’re doing it,” she warned, and “some American fiction writers don’t.”

Ann Napolitano certainly does. Taken together, her four novels, published over a span of nearly two decades, might be read as a career-long experiment in point of view. Each book fits the perspectives of its vibrant characters to the moral arcs of their stories in new and beguiling ways.

Napolitano’s debut novel, “Within Arm’s Reach,” included no fewer than six first-person points of view across three generations of an Irish Catholic family, each rendered in present tense yet with minute differences of register and tone. She followed up with “A Good Hard Look,” which enlisted Flannery O’Connor as part of a rich ensemble cast rendered in a close third person that perfectly suits the book’s themes of estrangement and desire.

Napolitano’s blockbuster third novel, “Dear Edward,” took more technical risks with point of view. One timeline roams through the cabin of an airplane in a daringly head-hopping third person as the doomed jet hurtles toward its fate. The relentless switches in perspective channel the unfolding catastrophe — until finally the narrative mirror breaks, and “the cockpit voice recorder stops” along with the little world the author has built inside the fuselage. The second timeline features the single point of view of Edward, the crash’s sole survivor, who floats in an eerie present tense between memory and oblivion.

There is a silent alchemy to point of view. The unsettling omniscience at the opening of Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere,” the sublime rupture of perspective delivered a third of the way through Sarah Waters’s “Fingersmith”: In the hands of a great novelist, point of view can transport us from an eagle’s eye to a child’s mind to a victim’s dying thoughts in a flash.

“Hello Beautiful,” Napolitano’s radiant and brilliantly crafted new novel, begins in 1960 with the birth of a boy — though with an immediately tragic twist that is also a negation: “For the first six days of William Waters’s life, he was not an only child.” Though William himself won’t come to understand its implications for many years, the childhood death of his older sister will go on to shape his life in fundamental ways. His relationship with his shattered parents is cold and distant; he’s stuck with a mother who scarcely listens when he speaks, and a heartbreakingly remote father (“With his daughter gone, the man’s face never opened again”). By the time William leaves for college, he understands “that they’d only ever had one child, and it wasn’t him.”

William finds refuge and kin in basketball. First spotted by a gym teacher in fifth grade, and talented (and tall) enough by his freshman year to start for the varsity team, he eventually wins a scholarship to Northwestern University, and goes on to spend the rest of his life in Chicago — though “Hello Beautiful” isn’t a typical sports novel, tracing the predictable arc of an elite athlete’s triumph, downfall and redemption. William’s basketball career is sidetracked by mediocrity, failure and devastating injury, but it’s also buoyed by lifelong camaraderie with teammates who will help sustain him through his most difficult moments.

William’s fortunes turn for the better with his marriage to Julia, eldest of the four Padavano sisters, whose warm family offers him the kind of raucous and love-filled life his aloof parents could never provide. At the same time, Julia, a perfectionist with a 10-year plan, has certain expectations for William (perhaps he’ll be a writer, perhaps a professor) that set him up for another kind of failure.

At first all seems well, thanks in no small part to the warm-hearted Sylvie, Julia’s bookishly romantic sister, who envisions herself as the impassioned heroine of a 19th-century novel and finds a model for later maturity in Walt Whitman’s “different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.”

In a marvellous early scene, Julia and her sisters argue over their parallels to the fictional March girls in “Little Women.” As the eldest and most practical, Julia seems the logical Meg, though she and Sylvie both claim themselves as “the feisty Jo, and they were both right.” This is a clear sign of trouble, as is the scene’s hint of tragedy to come: “Whenever any of the sisters was sick or forlorn, she’d declare herself Beth. One of us will be the first to die, they would take turns telling one another, and all four girls shuddered at the thought.”

The italicized truism does its work, darkening the sisters’ youthful exuberance with misfortunes on the novel’s horizons both near and distant: an attempted suicide, alienation and betrayal, divorce, disease, early death. These are recurring themes in Napolitano’s work, which resists the easy satisfactions of the sentimental and never settles for simple answers to emotional predicaments faced by her characters.

Such quandaries help frame the book’s elegant structure. Chapters move along in the braided perspectives of William, Julia and Sylvie in an unvarying pattern that breaks only at the novel’s midpoint, as William and Julia’s marriage falls apart. Julia twice leaves us for seven chapters at a time, during her self-imposed exile from the Chicago Padavanos for a new life and successful career in New York with Alice, the daughter she shares with William.

Though only a handful of chapters come from Alice’s point of view, the first lands like an emotional grenade, beginning with a brutal if necessary fable about her origins and estrangement from her father — a lie Julia will repeat throughout her childhood. Upon hearing it for the first time, the little girl, only 5, reacts with the kind of understated stolidity she has inherited from William: “Alice put down her spoon and said, ‘Oh.’”

Though William gets the plurality of chapters, he is the haziest character of the bunch, adept in the game of emotional distancing taught him by his parents. At times, like his best friend and former teammate Kent, you want to shake the guy by the shoulders and show him everything he has going for him. “You can’t hide love,” Kent warns; William will learn this lesson too slowly. By the end of the novel (no spoilers), William is allowed to break through the emotional chrysalis Napolitano has created for him, finding a potential source of resilience in the very tragedies that have narrowed his life.

In a poignant final scene, he observes that sometimes we need a change in perspective to show us the difficult truths of our own stories — and to help us understand the limits of our own outlooks and angles on the world. Here, just as the novel resolves its key emotional conflict, Napolitano comments slyly on the affective capacity of shifting point of view.

Sometimes, William Waters says, “we need another pair of eyes.”