I really like Steven Rowley, it turns out, and this was surprisingly good Yom Kippur reading. (I might argue that anything is good Yom Kippur reading if you interpret it properly—perhaps instead of a dissertation, literature students should be asked to find 39 ways to make meaning.)
Which is, in the end, doing this book a disservice. The story of how people come to terms with their lives and losses is sweetly done and Rowley handles it with a lightness that I think can be mistaken for shallowness, but that I think is actually just his commitment to the characters and the fact that they are not angsty people. Just interesting ones.