A widower’s shy tries at the dating game.

We first meet Edward, a sixtysomething high school science teacher who lives in North Jersey, shortly after his wife Bee has died. It’s not easy. He misses her, he feels out of place with their group of couple-friends, and for a while he can’t remember a single thing he enjoys doing.

Soon, though, in the way of sweet, comic, terrible things that happen in novels, his stepchildren – Bee’s grown daughter and son – surprise him by taking out a personal ad for him in his favorite paper, the New York Review of Books. He’s an available man, after all, for the first time in years, and to his surprise, he finds he’s in high demand.

Reluctantly, and with embarrassment, Edward looks at the dozens of responses to his ad – some of them perfumed, some of them misspelled, a few of them somewhat promising. He goes to dinner with a hard-edged lady in a miniskirt; to brunch with a sweeter woman who, unfortunately, is still preoccupied with her late husband; and to drinks with an older woman who startles and repels him with her plastic surgery-fake appearance. The whole experience is enough to send him running back to the woods, where he can look at the birds in peace. And there it is! A hobby he once enjoyed, returned to him.

But Wolitzer doesn’t leave him there, peering through his binoculars alone. In a way, it’s a shame she didn’t. Often a novel’s tension, or its sense of forward motion, begins to sag by the midway point, and thankfully that doesn’t happen in this one. Wolitzer is too good at what she does for that. But the thrust of her story, and something of the quality of the way she tells it, do change, and rather abruptly. We turn a page and learn that Edward has turned a page in his grief, so to speak, and from that point on the romantic intrigue begins in earnest. This new tale is less tender, less introspective than the one we started out reading. It’s cluttered with flirty e-mails, meaningful looks, phone numbers jotted on supermarket receipts. If you find the sillier details of “dating” boring, at any age, you won’t care much for all this.

And yet the novel remains impressively readable, and Edward more or less likable, simply because Wolitzer is such a capable storyteller. Her language, solid and serviceable throughout, delivers the occasional sparkling image. Edward leaves stones on Bee’s grave, in the Jewish tradition, “like primitive calling cards.” Another woman he meets is “lovely – in a strange way – as if she’d willed herself to be.” And without beating us over the head with it, Wolitzer blends in nice ideas about memory and the passage of time. Since so much of the narrative goes back and forth between Edward’s memories of Bee and his experiences with these new women, we get a poignant blurring of the present with his past, which is still alive in his mind. A sense of the whole scope of a life is present in these details: Between Edward’s very first date and his most recent one, 50 years have passed.

Wolitzer has also anchored her story in a specific place and (current) time, which gives it a feeling of vitality, even urgency. On one of his dates Edward meets a woman at MoMA for “The Artist Is Present,” a 2010 performance for which the artist Marina Abramovic sat in a chair all day every day and received visitors, who were invited to sit in the chair opposite her. Edward doesn’t make it through the long line to stare at the artist; he has a spat with his date and rushes out of the museum instead. The scene makes us mindful of the novel’s important ideas: the enduring need for human connection, however convoluted, and the funny ways in which other things, like the definition of art, change over time.

It happens that during the week I read this novel, I watched a movie called Beginners, which turned out to be an artful, pretentious thing about an elderly man who comes out as gay after his wife of many years dies. To highlight this paean to new love his son, played by Ewan McGregor (who’s no spring chicken himself anymore), falls for a French woman who teaches him that true love means flopping on the bed in soft focus and roller skating down hotel hallways, or something. Where that movie failed to stir real feeling, Wolitzer’s novel, for the most part, succeeds, precisely because the writer understands that it’s not a childish insistence on finding everything delightful but the full complexity of experience that gives a romance, late-life or otherwise, its real beauty.

If you are significantly younger than the folks in this novel, you may go into it expecting a voyeuristic experience, a glimpse into your own future. To Wolitzer’s credit it doesn’t really feel that way. There’s no curtain to push aside, no secrets revealed. Watching Edward struggle through his sadness and bewilderment into eventual confidence and ultimately joy, I was reminded that no one knows how to be old – or how to contend with any of life’s challenges – from the outset. We’re all just figuring it out as we go.