You know when you’ve had a really miserable day? There’s a million reasons why this can happen, covering everything from love to children, work and money. Well, I was having one. It was so bad that I felt as if misery were buzzing at the corner of my ears like background noise all day long. I spent the day at the university talking to graduate students (I’m Director of Graduate Studies at the moment) and eating too much. Then I dragged myself home through Penn Station, New York, only to miss my train and find that I had thirty minutes to wait. I went to the bookstore. There’s a stout Indian man who serves as a guardian to the store, rather like Cerberus at the River Styx, I suppose. He recognizes me now, so he moves to the side with a slight grunt. They sell a lot of my books, I reminded myself drearily, and managed to smile at him.

Then I wandered over to the new fiction pile. The other day on NPR I heard an interview with a writer who had a terrifying intelligent voice (of course, he was British, and being American means that you compulsively up the IQ of anyone speaking with a British accent). This author was talking about the fact that he mostly writes books of cartoons, or graphic novels, as people like to call them now. But he was arguing against that term, saying that he had found that the most denigrated popular fiction genres are the ones where people are allowed the do the most creative things. Nicely put, I thought, wondering if I was being quite as creative as I could be (anyone up for a dose of Victorian melodrama entering the Regency romance?).

At any rate, I bought Neil Gaiman’s novel on the strength of solidarity between those writing in denigrated genres. Anansi Boys turned out to have no pictures, so I guess I missed the hey-day of his graphic novels. Then I took myself onto the train. By the time I reached my house, I was caught in the book. I got the children into bed and went to bed. My husband apparently entered the room at one point; I don’t remember. I do remember his asking me to turn down the overhead light because that was annoying and disturbed the train of my reading.

Anansi Boys is a wonderful book. It’s literary fiction, with no pictures. But it’s literary fiction that’s compulsively readable, imaginative, funny, splendidly moral and includes not only a mystery but a romance. In fact, two romances. I finished it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. Get hold of this book somehow — take it out of the library if your budget doesn’t swing a hardcover at the moment.

The best thing I can say about it is that when I finally finished the last page, I wasn’t miserable anymore. I went to bed happy and interested, and I woke up in the same mood. I’m going to run this book all by itself this month because it’s both a romance and another kind of book, and darned if it doesn’t do both things incredibly well!