The Dive From Clausen's Pier

As you all already know, I am reading The Master and Margarita right now. But before I picked that up I was reading, rather vigorously I would say, The Dive From Clausen's Pier by Anne Packer. This is her first novel, but before it she wrote for The New Yorker and had a collection of short stories, Mendocino and Other Stories, which I believe she won some awards for--but don't quote me on that. The novel follows one young woman's post college search to find where in the world she belongs, which sounds kinda cheesy, but that's my own fault, not Packer's. The book centers around one highly debatable ethical question: how much of ourselves are we required to give to others? And when do we have to put ourselves first? A review from The New Yorker describes it this way:

At the start of this quietly engrossing début novel, twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell is tiring of her stalled life in Madison, Wisconsin, and her bland, relentlessly loving boyfriend of eight years' standing. When a dive into the local reservoir leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, she flees to Manhattan, where she takes shelter with a group of wannabe artists in a decaying Chelsea brownstone and falls for an elusive older man. The journey is a familiar one, but Packer fleshes it out with a naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented, and capable of mistakes that the author may never have intended. The result is genuine suspense, as Carrie feels her way toward the truth about herself, and what it means to be a moral being.

I'm can't out-right recommend this book to everyone, obvioulsy, because what book can be recommened with such overarching confidence (besdies this one) but I will say that I really really enjoyed it and if, when recalling the past, you find that you often like the same books as I do, then it would be well worth your while to pick it.