The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

by Phaedra Patrick

The Mysterious Charms of Arthur Pepper is a fast read, and the characters in the story move through grief and the process of beginning life again. The titular hero – and “titular” is one of my favorite words btw – also learns to become who he wants to be now, instead of existing in a sort of holding pattern following the sum of his habits and obeying the expectations of those around him.

Arthur Pepper’s wife died unexpectedly of pneumonia. On the first anniversary of her death, he goes to clean out her clothing and finds a gold charm bracelet that he couldn’t remember seeing before. The charms form the path of the story: an Indian elephant with an emerald on its back, a paint palette, a book, a thimble, and a heart. Beginning with the elephant, which inexplicably has a name and phone number engraved on it, Arthur traces the story of his wife’s life before she married him some forty years earlier.

Arthur’s journey is emotional and difficult. He has to break habits and routines that had once been comfortable and now seemed like a restrictive prison built of times and expectations. He learns to appreciate the neighbors who ask after him and the friend who brought pies and cakes to his home in the year after his wife died, likely keeping him alive. He learns that his relationships are his responsibility, and he has to change in order to thrive in the time he has now as a widower.

A lot of the evolution Arthur struggles through reminded me of the epic MetaFilter thread on emotional labor, and the PDF summary of the comments therein. Many widowers wither and die shortly after their spouses, in part because their spouse did the labor of maintaining friendships and emotional ties.

The story isn’t surprising, and there are moments that seem too twee to be real. There’s a shocking revelation that was built up as a major turning point, but it didn’t shock me all that much. The story of the charms themselves wasn’t as compelling as Arthur learning to move on with his life, figuring out who he was and who he wants to be, and walking through the hardest parts of grief to get to the next charm, the next location, the next piece of the story of his wife. He mourns her by learning who she was before she was in his life.

The part that got to me most was the ending, which I won’t spoil. I was teary eyed at the ending scenes because he learned how to be a better parent when his daughter needed him most. He learned how much his wife loved him, when all along his journey he had reason to doubt their relationship now that he was the only one remembering it while confronting so much contradictory  information about her past before she met him. He learned how much he was loved, and that he had value, that his life was a contribution and was worth remembering. Arthur questions his own legacy, if anyone would remember him with fond grief after he died the way he mourned his wife. In the end, his realization that his life mattered, that he was loved, and that he had more to give the world before he died, too, was terribly poignant and made me sniffle for quite awhile after I closed the book.

– SB Sarah

Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Pepper lives a simple life. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a.m., just as he did when his wife, Miriam, was alive. He dresses in the same gray slacks and mustard sweater vest, waters his fern, Frederica, and heads out to his garden.

But on the one-year anniversary of Miriam’s death, something changes. Sorting through Miriam’s possessions, Arthur finds an exquisite gold charm bracelet he’s never seen before. What follows is a surprising and unforgettable odyssey that takes Arthur from London to Paris and as far as India in an epic quest to find out the truth about his wife’s secret life before they met—a journey that leads him to find hope, healing and self-discovery in the most unexpected places.

Featuring an unforgettable cast of characters with big hearts and irresistible flaws, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper is a joyous celebration of life’s infinite possibilities.

Literary Fiction