Jessica Soffer’s This Is a Love Story is an exploration of a long marriage between an artist and a writer, played out against a New York City background. Knowing that she’s dying, Jane tells Abe she wants to remember their many decades together, the good times and the bad, many spent in their brownstone apartment overlooking Central Park.
You remember a moment when you realized we’d become what we’d always hoped. And at the same time, saying, I couldn’t have done it without you.
I remember walking so many, many, many streets with you. Eating so many meals, sharing a tres leches, two spoons. And drinking tea.
Jane and Abe met in 1967 in their early twenties, she intent on a career as an artist, he eventually succumbing to the pull of his father’s business, setting his writing aside. She had been insistent that they should both put their art above all else, refusing to live with him until he picked up his writing again. Jane excelled in every media she worked, from sculpture, to painting, to textile dyeing, while Abe became a prize-winning author, internationally feted. Her ambivalence about becoming a mother resolved itself after a miscarriage but when Max is born, she’s overwhelmed by an episode of postnatal depression which only re-immersion in her art eases. Max grows into a man, distant from his mother, wary of emotional involvement, hugely successful in his career as an art dealer. Now, in their final days together, no chance of another remission from the cancer first diagnosed when Max was only five, Jane devotes what little energy she has left to recounting her memories of their past to Abe.
You remember when the blaming started. You remember it wasn’t just Max. You remember the feeling – like we’d gone flat, distant, murky, like water left in a glass for too many nights in a row.
I’d been expecting a straightforward continuous narrative but Soffer’s novel is made up of a string of episodic vignettes, short paragraphs of Jane’s memories, narrated for us by Abe. It’s a style that takes some getting used to. The section narrated by Alice, Abe’s student with whom he had a brief connection which scars his marriage, jarred with me in a way Max’s section didn’t, casting light on his relationship with his parents. That said, the structure and style lend an intimacy to Soffer’s book together with an urgency as Jane becomes more diminished. Her writing is quite beautiful at times, conveying the depth of this relationship between two people, both flawed, deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, one aware that he will soon be left alone. Interspersed with their story are brief sections devoted to Central Park where Abe and Jane have spent so many hours – another love story of sorts full of characters, nature, performance and celebration. It’s a place Soffer clearly adores. Not an easy novel to write about – I don’t feel I’ve entirely done it justice – but it’s one that will stay with me for some time.
Serpent’s Tail London 9781805224921 304 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)
