When Grief Becomes Plot: Steven Rowley's New Novel Is Already Headed to Television
There is a particular kind of novel that arrives quietly and without warning, carrying inside it a premise so peculiar that you need a moment to decide whether you find it charming or absurd. Steven Rowley's Take Me With You (Putnam) is one of those books. The premise: Jesse del Ruth's husband Norman vanishes into a beam of light in their backyard. One evening he is there; the next, he is not. What follows is not science fiction but grief, the mundane devastation of absence, rendered strange by the method of departure.
I thought of Tove Jansson, who understood that the most unsettling losses are often the ones that offer no reasonable explanation — no accident to point at, no body to bury in the conventional sense. The strangeness in Take Me With You is not the beam of light itself but what comes after: Jesse must navigate single life, a conspiracy-obsessed neighbour, and the growing sense that someone is following him, while the fundamental question of what happened to Norman remains stubbornly unanswered. A Kirkus critic called it «a sweet and tart story stretched over a quirky frame», which is about right, though it undersells the emotional weight of what Rowley is actually doing.
The announcement this week that the novel will be adapted for television — developed by Warner Bros. Television, with Bill Lawrence attached as executive producer — is, at first glance, the kind of news that arrives neatly. Lawrence is the co-creator of Ted Lasso and Shrinking, both of which built their emotional architecture on grief and the improbable friendships it produces. There is a logic here: Rowley's novel, like those series, is fundamentally about people who must invent new lives in the wreckage of the ones they had planned.
Whether that logic survives the translation from page to screen is a different question. Rowley's previous novel, The Guncle (2021), was optioned for film four years ago; as far as anyone can tell, that adaptation is still somewhere in development's long corridor of unfulfilled intentions. Books about quiet men and invisible losses are difficult to translate into visual narrative without losing the very quality that made them worth adapting in the first place.
Still, Lawrence is not an unserious choice. And the novel — just published, still finding its readers — deserves the attention, whatever form it eventually takes. Perhaps that is the right order: the book first, the image after.