The heart of Henry Quantum

Pepper Harding is a pseudonym for [a:Amy Ruttan|2561526|Amy Ruttan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1229532030p2/2561526.jpg], a Canadian romance novelist who has wanted to do a different kind of writing.
As a “first novel,” [b:The Heart of Henry Quantum|29430738|The Heart of Henry Quantum|Pepper Harding|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1475565847l/29430738.SY75.jpg|49695301] succeeds in being different from most romance novels, but my image of them is formed solely from the covers of the books I see and stereotypes about them I hear.
Quantum is a breezy, fast moving book many will read in a day. It’s about a forty-year-old San Francisco advertising executive in a loveless marriage who’s mission of the day in which the entire novel takes place, two days before Christmas, is to buy his wife the uninspired gift of a bottle of Channel No. 5 perfume.
Whether you see Henry as a lovable, goofy version of Ben Affleck or not will depend on you and the kind of partner you seek or have sought—a focused, goal-oriented, high achiever, or a sweet daydreamer who ponders the kind of thing we all did in our teens and early twenties, often while under the influence of something, but haven’t thought much about since, like how can we know anything is real given that the speed of light, fast as it is, is still not instant, so the coffee cup just two feet away from you may not exist as you’re seeing it, but may have winked out of being and the photons streaming onto your rods and cones bear only its memory.
Oddly, Henry Quantum’s last name, which refers to the theory stating that energy comes and goes in a more haphazard way than you’d think, warrants no mention, even though much of his inner monologue has to do with philosophy and physics.
Henry’s choice is between two women, his wife, Margaret, and Daisy, the woman he’d had an affair with four years before. The book is in four parts: Henry, Margaret, Daisy, and Henry again. The action takes place in San Francisco, which the author has fallen in love with. Street names and neighborhood descriptions abound, and the author’s note at the end begins by assuring the reader that with few exceptions every place in the novel is real and that Henry’s trek is one which could be replicated by the reader. This does not annoy, unless the reader has an aversion to that city.
An odd thing, maybe, for me to notice, is that Quantum makes no attempt at diversity among its characters. There are no blacks, Asians (except for a Filipino store clerk near the end), openly gay or transgendered people here. I liked it for that; she feels confident enough in her story to stick with the well-off white people it’s about. As important as it is to learn from those around us who have different backgrounds, needs and wants, Quantum reminds us that the topic here, love, is universal enough that the issues and problems the quest for it create can be described even while using a narrow slice of the human pie.