Georgie, from her more experienced perspective, worries sagely that “just because you love someone, that doesn’t mean your lives will fit together.” But young Neal brings his own wisdom to the relationship, and an Eleanor & Park–esque faith that love can solve, or at least help ameliorate, the inevitable difficulties of life. Indeed, the Neal of the past who “still looked at Georgie like she was something brand-new and supernatural,” though he’s 22, reads somewhat like a YA teen: lacking any foreknowledge of his adult life, his emotions raw and felt for the first time. It’s wistfully evocative to pair those scenes with the more stately (and sometimes exhausted) aspects of adult life, and, not least, the comfort and trust a couple grows to place in one another. The scenes of Neal and Georgie’s first confusing, exciting steps toward love-their awkward conversations and even more awkward make-out sessions-are enjoyable in a way redolent of reading YA. This structure allows adult Georgie to revisit her younger self, a technique that doesn’t occur in YA, but which, notably, heightens the experience of reading YA as an adult. Along with the business about the magic phone, Rowell writes numerous flashback scenes, allowing two Georgies to exist in tandem with the two Neals: the fresh twentysomething versions just starting out, and the married, love-worn parents heading into their 40s. The show Georgie’s been developing since college is called Passing Time, and the passage of time is key to Landline. While the device of the telephone occasionally seems a little bit clunky-maybe it’s just all that rotary dialing-the way it allows Rowell to bend time back and forth has plenty of interesting ramifications, and makes sense as a technique for an author comfortable writing for and about teens and adults.
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