Madeleine Van Hecke’s Ada, Old and New gets much of its energy from a familiar family problem: knowing someone so well that you stop being curious about them. Ada, a widowed, retired math teacher in her seventies, has spent decades working for social justice and looking out for her younger brother, Tim. He’s charming, hopeful, financially strapped, and convinced there’s still a great romance waiting for him. She’s quick to spot danger and quicker to offer advice. Set during the first months of 2020, the novel brings their long-established habits into a world changing by the day. It’s an absorbing portrait of how love, worry, and resentment can occupy the same room.

Van Hecke is especially good at showing how those feelings live in ordinary things. An unfinished chess game, a familiar television comedy, a scarf chosen by someone you love: these details carry the history that the characters struggle to put into words. Ada’s grief for her husband, Luc, has a physical presence, expressed through clothing, touch, and the garden they tended together. Her conversations with her daughter, Sonja, have the uncomfortable accuracy of family arguments in which everyone remembers a different version of the same afternoon. Tim brings humor and tenderness, along with an exhausting talent for making his problems someone else’s responsibility. You can feel Ada’s frustration and still wince at what she says. That shifting sympathy is one of the book’s strongest qualities.

Ada brought to mind the central character in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, another retired teacher whose sharp judgments coexist with vulnerability and a hunger for connection. Both writers understand how a person can be perceptive about other people and painfully confused about herself. Van Hecke gives that tension a particularly public dimension through Ada’s activism and her relationships with Black friends and colleagues. Her friendship with Nora is especially interesting because it involves affection, unequal experiences, and the hard work of listening. Ada’s confidence in her good intentions repeatedly meets other people’s need to speak for themselves. Those encounters make the novel’s questions about dignity and respect feel immediate. They also connect her political convictions with the way she behaves at home.

The book’s style is direct and conversational, with dialogue doing much of the emotional work. Some arguments circle back over familiar ground, and a few exchanges explain their ideas so fully that you can feel the scene slowing down. The repetition also captures something recognizable about families: people keep pressing the same sore spot because they’re still hoping for a different response. The pandemic setting intensifies that pattern, bringing fears about health, dependence, and isolation into everyday decisions. I found the novel most compelling when a small gesture exposed the need underneath someone’s certainty. Its attention to older adults’ desire, pride, and longing gives the characters lives that feel full and ongoing. Ada, Old and New offers plenty for readers who enjoy discussing difficult characters, especially the question of how we care for someone while allowing them a life of their own.

Pages: 258