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A mystery of words, meaning, and the randomness of life makes The Broken Teaglass a quiet yet beguiling read.

Billy is fresh out of college and takes his first grown-up job at the Samuelson Company, creators of the finest and most exhaustive dictionaries. He takes an apartment in the run down town that is home to Samuelson, and waits for something to happen, yet nothing seemingly ever does in the quiet office filled with lexicographers and their words. During a bit of training, Mona, Billy’s slightly senior coworker, finds a strange citation in the endless files of examples of word usage: a long excerpt from a nonexistent book called The Broken Teaglass. Mona, caught in the endless dreariness of the job thinks they have stumbled onto a mystery, and Billy, eager for something more in his empty new adult life, tags along.

A mystery it is - they begin breaking the pattern behind the strange citations, and what begins to unfold before them is a dark tale, a story of love and alienation, of the everyday and the extraordinary. And of course, a tale of a corpse.

Mona plunges headfirst into the tale, while Billy, who has his own secrets, helps, but at an arm’s length. It is not until the reality of the crime behind the Broken Teaglass comes crashing into Billy’s too-quiet world just at the moment when Billy’s own sickly past catches up with him that our protagonist begins to drown in his own emotions, and it is not a pretty sight.

Ultimately, this is a story of people, of the things that make their lives empty, the things that scar them. Though the revelations come bracketed by the book’s underlying mystery, this is not something you’d find on the mystery isle of a bookstore; rather it is a low-key and somewhat maudlin tale about the emptiness left behind when something bad happens for no apparent reason. If it weren’t for the fact that the book’s main action and character development always happens within the confines of the circumstances surrounding The Broken Teaglass, I wouldn’t use the word mystery at all. The book tries very hard to be something profound, and though the book is somewhat compelling, it isn’t a novel that will change your life or even stick with you for very long - though it is a distracting read.

The true cleverness of the book lies in the way it plays with words and word lovers, which, naturally, are usually found with their noses buried in a book (hey, it takes one to know one, and all of that). By establishing a select group of lexicographers as the main characters, the reader is brought into the group and made to feel a part; word fans will enjoy the little debates about usage and meanings and the history of our cultural glue. It is a fun tweak of the literary nose.

A mystery that you will want to solve ripe with literary jokes, this novel may not be the stuff of legend but it is diverting nonetheless, and a worthy read.

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