While passionate love affairs are standard fictional fare, the more quotidian stories of long marriages don't often possess the same literary appeal. Some readers may reevaluate that assessment after reading Jessica Soffer's This Is a Love Story, a realistic and affecting account of how one couple's bond is tested and endures in the face of life's inevitable challenges.
Soffer (Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots) tells the story of Abe and Jane, residents of New York City. He's a novelist and poet who's managed to pair a successful writing career with a job in his family's textile business, while she's an equally talented artist. In chapters that loop through time from their first meeting at Tavern on the Green in 1967 to the long days, decades later, when Jane is dying after a recurrence of cancer, Soffer explores everything, including Abe's brush with infidelity, Jane's postpartum depression after the birth of their son, Max, and the arcs of their respective artistic careers that oscillate between the poles of mutual support and occasional professional jealousy.
Soffer shifts effortlessly among the perspectives of Abe, Jane, and Max (and one character outside the family). "They were never a family per se," she writes. "They were a triangle broken into lines." That description seems most apt in characterizing Jane's difficulty in bonding with Max as a newborn, a tension that carries over into his adulthood. One of the novel's predominant tropes involves Abe at Jane's bedside recounting her memories of moments in their lives together in many sentences that begin with the words, "you remember." He describes these moments with an easy grace, whether his own recollections of them are wistful or painful.
Soffer periodically leaves behind the story of this talented but in many ways unexceptional family for visits to Central Park, the site "where the most important moments of their lives have taken place." These chapters touch on the history of the park, the idiosyncrasies of some its current denizens, and more, offering the opportunity for some of the novel's most evocative writing, as when Soffer imagines hundreds of thousands of people dreaming of "childhoods spent in the Park, eating cherry Italian ices, feeding the chipmunks nuts, being barefoot for the only time in this city, the cold grass like wings between their toes."
In the end, Abe observes that "there has never been fault between us. Or at least never anything specific. You were. I was. We have always just been water, slipping through holes." In a sense, any attempt at summing up a long-term marriage is destined to fail. But in the case of Abe and Jane, it's a lovely and fitting benediction to an emotionally resonant story of their inextricably paired lives. ---Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Jessica Soffer's second novel is an honest, affecting story of a long-time marriage.