The Novel Habits of Happiness

Starred review from June 1, 2015
No writer makes the philosophical life as inviting and cozy as Smith does in his episodic novels featuring Isabel Dalhousie. In her native Edinburgh, Isabel fills many roles: editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, mother of Charlie, partner of Jamie, and solver of mysteries. When people in Isabel’s circle have troubles, they come to her (“I am a recipient of unusual confidences,” she says to herself). In this 10th installment (after 2012’s The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds), six-year-old Harry is “convinced that he’s had another life,” complete with another family and a house with a red door near a lighthouse. Isabel looks into this odd situation with her usual efficiency, ready intelligence, and highly sympathetic nature. Smith adds a modicum of narrative energy with a subplot about a minor academic feud, but plot isn’t the point. The real substance of this charming series lies in Isabel’s thoughtful observations and the interactions among a large cast of characters. Agent: Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency.

May 15, 2015
More felony-free mystery for Edinburgh philosopher Isabel Dalhousie (The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, 2012, etc.), for whom all the world is one moral conundrum after another. Kirsten, the downstairs neighbor of Isabel's friend Sam, has an unusual problem. It's not so much a problem as a question: Why does her 6-year-old son, Harry, keep going on about his other life, the one that involves a different home and a different family? Isabel knows all about the imaginary friends of children-her husband, bassoonist Jamie, created one himself as a child-but Harry's tales of living in a house by the sea with the Campbell family and a view of offshore islands and a nearby lighthouse seem unusually detailed and consistent from one telling to the next. Can Isabel help, not just by lending a sympathetic ear, but by actually getting to the bottom of the little mystery that's causing Kirsten such anxiety? Of course she can, as soon as she tears herself away from a deliciously snarky exchange with her nemesis, professor Christopher Dove, at the Enlightenment Institute, and puts aside her musings about her niece Cat's unwontedly sensitive and intellectual new boyfriend, Mick, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamie. Isabel asks her spiritualist housekeeper, Grace, about reincarnation, gets a line on a likely lighthouse in Ardnamurchan from her friend Peter Stevenson, travels there in the company of Peter's friend Neil Starling, and then finds a completely different answer to her riddle. But the most memorable episodes-Isabel's impromptu tea with the wife of Dove's unpleasant mentor, Robert Lettuce, and her perusal of "The Ethical World of My Mother," an essay professor Geoffrey Trembling has submitted to The Review of Applied Ethics-have nothing to do with the mystery that provides a pretext for Isabel's ruminations. The woolliest of Isabel's ten appearances to date and the one that makes the most decided case for the mental digression as a structural principle.

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June 1, 2015
McCall Smith has two series heroines. One is Precious Ramotswe, the proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana. The other is Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and editor of a philosophical review in Edinburgh. Both help people with their problems. Dalhousie is a philosopher to her core, and most of this book focuses on her wide-ranging musings and conversations, which can be funny, shocking, and thought provoking in themselves. The central action in this latest series entry concerns a woman who comes to Isabel through a mutual friend because of her little boy, who is convinced that he had a previous life. His incredibly vivid memories send Isabel off to a Scottish island that the boy appears to be describing. This voyage opens up more questions and a thorny ethical dilemma. Isabel has an enviable situation, with inherited wealth, a beyond-handsome young husband, a charming child, and engaging work. She verges on insufferable, in fact, and one wonders whether McCall Smith, whose other novels have delightfully flawed and quirky characters, means Isabel to be admirable or appalling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2015

In the tenth in the relentlessly best-selling Isabel Dalhousie series, the Edinburgh philosopher and amateur sleuth is approached by a woman whose son recalls perfect images of an island off the coast of Scotland he's never seen. Obviously, Isabel is curious. The series will now be released in summer, that hot reading time.

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