Anna Montague’s debut novel is a thoughtful and affecting story about wayward love, regret and missed opportunity. Judging by the bright jacket and snappy title, a reader would be forgiven for thinking that “How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?” might be similar to other novels that it looks like — “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” or “The Misfortune of Marion Palm.” Witty, slightly madcap books about middle-aged women in crisis.

But that is not “Magda.” While Montague has a subtle, surprising sense of the absurd (one character’s brain felt as though it “had been wrung dry and then ladled with molasses”), she is more interested in making you think and feel than in making you laugh.

Magda is an intense psychiatrist who lives on cigarettes and coffee and who has been secretly in love with her best friend, Sara, for decades. This repressed passion might even be secret to herself — while she thinks of Sara constantly, yearns to be with her and despises Sara’s husband, Fred, Magda goes no further than that in her own mind.

Magda comes by this repression naturally. A romantic encounter she had as a teenager proved traumatic when her mother caught the two girls kissing. And then there was Magda’s psychiatric training: “Electroconvulsive therapy had been popularized as treatment for myriad issues — severe depression, of course, but also homosexuality. A professor, during a first-year lecture, espoused the benefits of such therapy while touching lightly upon the risks.”

Sara had planned a road trip for the two of them to celebrate Magda’s 70th birthday but then she suddenly died. Fred entrusted Magda with the urn of Sara’s ashes while he entertained his new girlfriend. So Magda straps the urn into the passenger seat of her car and off they go — the tightly wound psychiatrist and the ashes of her love, from Manhattan to Virginia to New Orleans.

This setup seems as though it could yield goofy fun, but when one of the road-trip buddies is dead, most of the action has to take place in flashbacks or inside the main character’s head.

Still, Montague’s story covers a lot of ground; everywhere Magda looks she sees people wrestling with romantic angst — Fred, as it turns out, never really loved Sara; one of Magda’s clients is trying to decide between having a baby with his wife or running away with a man named Ernesto, and even Boomer, Magda’s colleague, has a secret yearning. Throughout the novel, people are afraid to act, to seize happiness.

Magda eventually realizes that a little courage, years before, might have set her free. “Even if she knew Sara would say no, suppose she had leaned in anyway.”

“Magda” is an engaging read, though Montague does herself no favors with a confusing beginning — the novel opens with a character who disappears for most of the book — and long-winded sentences that require more than one read. “Following that initial grieving period, Gwen’s resultant issue was a fixation with mortality that sank tenterhooks into her daily life, rendering most endeavors doomed from the outset” is quite the line to encounter on the very first page.

But maybe it’s a warning that there’s more to this book than the cover suggests. Maybe it’s an invitation to slow down, and enjoy the ride.

____

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

By: Anna Montague.

Publisher: Ecco, 256 pages, $28.

©2024 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.