In the opening lines of Hilma Wolitzer’s wonderful new novel, the recently widowed Edward Schuyler stands in his living room, ironing, when the telephone rings. He picks it up to hear the clamorous, intrusive voice of a female suitor, attempting to break in on his grief. But he’d rather iron the blouses of his deceased wife, Bee, “as a way of reconnecting with her when she was so irrevocably gone” than date any of the women now scurrying in his direction. Bee, on her deathbed, had predicted this fate: “Look at you. They’ll be crawling out of the woodwork.”.... As dark as this material might sound, it isn’t. Wolitzer’s vision of the world, for all its sorrow, is often hilarious and always compassionate. Her novels are social comedies: they may feature jiltings, separations and bereavement, but they tend to have happy endings.

As she has demonstrated in earlier books like Summer Reading and The Doctor's Daughter, Wolitzer is a champ at the closely observed, droll novel of manners, while also recognizing that — for both her characters and her readers — there's more at stake than laughs in the situations she depicts. An Available Man chronicles Edward's clumsy adventures in, as one character puts it, "Dating After Death"; but it also goes further emotionally, evoking the swampy stages of grief and the raw loneliness that haunts Edward, as well as all those women circling him.