Book Review: Sybil Baker’s The Life Plan
By Darryl Lynne Evans
The beginning of Sybil Baker's novel, The Life Plan, has the feel of a screwball romantic comedy. Kat is a D.C. patent lawyer, on the track to making partner, who wants what successful American women are supposed to want: "A two-story colonial with two children, an employed husband and comfort food—is that too much to ask?" Actually, she wants a little more: Hermes scarves. Kat has written down her "Life Plan" and had it notarized to ensure there are no derivations from her path. In true romcom fashion, Baker's novel also has the spirited friends, crazy mother, and pratfalls to keep the story upbeat when trouble brews on the horizon, which it quickly does. Events soon take Kat to Thailand as she chaperones her husband in his attempts to find himself and a new career by going to Thai Massage School. Kat goes along to ensure he doesn't find anyone else, especially Tiffany, his gorgeous partner from yoga class.
Just when the story seems set up to run the traditional romcom course, Baker turns the reader's expectations on end. This is not a typical chick lit story for all that Bridget Jones's Diary is actually invoked on page 8. When her marriage falls apart for real, Kat at first sinks into depression and drinking. Her friends and mother are sometimes unreliable or unavailable, nor can they help her solve her problems. This is not a romcom but something greater; Baker gives us a new contemporary heroine whose one big adventure in life is not about finding or keeping a husband, but about finding herself. Though Kat continues to go through the motions of winning her husband back and keeping her "Life Plan" on track, the real issue is her need to recognize that the trappings she thinks she wants in life are not all that they seem.
For one, her husband, far from sharing her life-long vision, has a different world view. He wants "to wander the world, meet people, live in the moment, and share that moment's love, without regard for the past or the future. Surely that's the enlightened life." What he sees as the "enlightened life" is the life of the slacker-backpackers who "worked for a year, quit their jobs, and then traveled until the money ran out…stints teaching English in Korea or Taiwan or Japan before traveling again for months on end." A far cry from her steady job and savings account.
As Kat spends time with new friends from other cultures, they show her other possibilities in life choices and reveal the flaws in her plan. That doesn't mean the story turns bleak. Baker keeps the upbeat spirit of the romcom even as she updates it to give us a realistic heroine we can identify with. The novel may not give Kat the happily-ever-after ending we expect at the start, but she and readers get a satisfying and real ending.
Darryl Lynne Evans writes about women and the west. She has an MFA from Purdue.
Check out Sybil Baker’s website and order the book. http://www.sybilbaker.com/home.html