DON’T BE A STRANGER is a vividly rendered story of an older woman’s sexual obsession with a much younger lover. Despite its darkness, one comes away from the novel impressed with Susan Minot’s ability to create a deep and realistic psychological portrait of a woman enmeshed in a complex mid-life identity crisis.

As the book opens, 52-year-old writer and teacher Ivy Cooper has been divorced for more than a year and is the mother of an eight-year-old boy. When she spends an evening at a Brooklyn dinner party with Ansel Fleming, a singer-songwriter in his mid-30s, their attraction is instantaneous. But for all of his allure, Ansel is a man with a far from spotless past. Desperate to raise money to finance an album on his own, he had turned to drug dealing and only recently has been released after serving half of his 14-year prison sentence. Now he’s trying to rebuild his musical career, but he recognizes that he’s only taken the first steps on the long journey to professional success and social respectability.

"Despite its darkness, one comes away from the novel impressed with Susan Minot’s ability to create a deep and realistic psychological portrait of a woman enmeshed in a complex mid-life identity crisis."

The pair make a “direct beeline to sex,” engaging in frequent couplings --- first at Ansel’s apartment and then at Ivy’s, with Ivy often eagerly responding to Ansel’s summonses to be ready for his attention on short notice. Ivy recognizes almost immediately that “a chunk had been sliced from her usual world and was replaced with a glowing wedge,” even as Ansel warns her that “there’s a lot you don’t know about me.” One of Minot’s principal successes in the novel is to make their sexual chemistry feel utterly plausible despite the gap in their ages of nearly two decades.

But almost from the beginning, there’s another gap that becomes utterly problematic. It’s the one between Ansel’s desire for a commitment-free sexual relationship and Ivy’s longing for something more profound. Early on, she informs him that “I’m starting to get attached to you,” only to have him reply that it’s “not a good idea,” underscoring that comment with the admonition that a relationship “is not in the cards for me.” Learning from a mutual friend that he’s looking for an apartment with another woman only worsens her distress.

It also seems that Ivy hasn’t fully processed her divorce from Everett, a fundamentally decent but emotionally distant man she meets at a wedding in Kenya and whom she joins in Tanzania, where he works as an agricultural planner, after their marriage. At first, in a relationship where they “had not agreed on what love looked like,” they’re ambivalent about having a child, but eventually they overcome their mutual reluctance. Their son, Nicky, now spends the school year with his mother in her apartment near Washington Square and summers at his father’s family home in Virginia. Ivy is a devoted mother, but the stress of caring for her bright, active son while also trying to earn a living as a freelance writer, all the while obsessing over the next text or call from Ansel, almost becomes unbearable.

Eventually, to assuage her pain, Ivy turns, with varying degrees of relief, to an array of potential remedies that include therapy, yoga and a 12-step program. Like the rest of the novel, they’re described from her point of view, a narrative choice that gives the story a refreshing immediacy and creates greater sympathy for her, even if at times that’s tempered with a helping of exasperation over her seeming inability to move on from Ansel. A health crisis for one of the characters --- as life abruptly intrudes on Ivy’s romantic fantasies --- brings the story to a dramatic close.

Near the end of DON’T BE A STRANGER, Ivy sums up her personal crisis in these plaintive words: “She would describe her dilemma, as wanting to be with but not being able to stay with a man.” Her affair with Ansel is a memorable one that’s imprinted on her skin and on her heart. Her struggles both in and outside it make for an appealing and fully realized character, all the more so for her utterly human flaws.