“I have so many cities under my belt,” the narrator of this unpredictable epistolary novel thinks early on in “The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell.” Bell is a woman who left her Maine hometown decades ago for a musician’s life on the road. By the time the book begins, Mimsy is 80 years old and has returned home after the death of Lawrence, her longtime musical and romantic partner.
But it’s another lost love to whom she’s writing in the letters that largely comprise this novel: Gerald, her first love, who drowned in a nearby river at the age of 21. A little over halfway through the novel, the first by Mainer Laurel Dodge, Mimsy reflects on her own long life. “Do we always return to our beginnings before we meet our ends?” she writes — and while aging is a running theme in Dodge’s novel, it isn’t the most prominent one.
Instead, Dodge traces the way that Mimsy reconnects — sometimes haltingly, sometimes warmly — with the town that she left behind decades earlier. This takes different forms: She strikes up a deep friendship with a local police officer. She finds new collaborators for her musical endeavors — and she makes the occasional trip to Brownfield for live music.
“The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell” By Laurel Dodge Littoral Books $20 Mimsy’s occasionally wry, often insightful observations on the world around her make for a memorable narrative voice. One running subplot follows Mimsy’s quest for a new house, though she also muses on the .