In Roxana Robinson’s “Leaving,” two former lovers who broke up in college meet decades later at the opera and their passion is reignited. The reconnection is joyful, but there are complications to their second chance to be together.
The award-winning author explained that she wanted her latest book to explore how romance is changed in the second half of life. “Passion is the same, but your life is different. There are parts of your life that didn’t exist before … family, obligations, responsibilities.”
The former couple’s encounter at the glittering Metropolitan Opera House quickly gives way to daunting challenges to their relationship. Sarah, divorced and with grown children, lives outside New York. Warren and his dutiful wife live in Boston with a willful daughter who soon presents him with an agonizing ultimatum. Does the lovers’ reunion at “Tosca,” the tragic opera, forebode a less-than-happy ending?
Warren faces a moral reckoning, questioning whether he is duty-bound to lead a certain life and sacrifice his happiness for others. Sarah reflects on the clash between traditional morality and the modern pursuit of self-fulfillment. She invokes Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence” — a novel that extols the virtues of honor and the renunciation of adulterous love for the greater good. It’s a book she adores, but wishes had a different ending.
Robinson’s book is rich with elegantly articulated truths about the emotional landscape of marriage, divorce, and parenting. Her poetic prose and well-crafted characters make “Leaving” a sober exploration of joy and heartache. The novel’s themes resonate beyond its shattering conclusion, offering ample fodder for book club discussions on moral choice and consequences.
In “The Mighty Red,” Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Louse Erdrich crafts an affecting novel that intertwines a love triangle with a tale of ancestry, land rights, and climate change. The story is set in a beet-farming community in North Dakota’s Red River Valley during the 2008 financial crisis, and Erdrich’s evocative storytelling draws readers deep into the lives of a struggling rural family.
At the story’s core is Crystal, a resilient Ojibwe mother laboring on the night shift trucking beets on the farm as her failed stage-actor husband vanishes with stolen funds. Her teenage daughter, Kismet, is torn between her feelings for two love interests: the privileged jock son of the farm’s owners and her bookish home-schooled genius friend. Faced with a marriage proposal, Kismet makes a decision, the motive for which remains unclear to her as well as to readers.
Erdrich’s nuanced prose captures the physical and spiritual rhythms of a working farm community at a crossroads. The adults battle daily against the backdrop of a challenging economy and environmental degradation, while those in the younger generation grapple with their yearnings and their futures — some still haunted by a tragic memory.
As with Erdrich’s previous works that link historical with current injustices, “The Mighty Red” is a moving novel that blurs a narrative of personal drama with the profound consideration of the pressures of economic and environmental upheavals on those who are most challenged by them.
Geraldine Brooks’s 2022 historical novel “Horse” captivated readers with its rich storytelling and social insight, and introduced me to this remarkable literary talent. Her latest work, “Memorial Days,” shifts genres and offers a moving memoir about love, loss, and rebuilding after the death of her famed husband, Tony Horwitz.
Brooks recounts their shared journey: meeting as journalism students, becoming foreign correspondents, getting married, and turning into parents and later Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. But their vibrant lives together end abruptly on Memorial Day 2019 when Tony, aged 60, dies of sudden cardiac arrest during a book tour. In the years that follow, Brooks retreats to a remote island off the coast of her native Australia to mourn and confront her grief.
After Horwitz’s death, Brooks recalibrates her understanding of her husband. An autopsy reveals unheeded health warnings to avoid excessive stress and over drinking. Through reading his copious journals, Brooks is able to do what death denies her: learn new things about Horwitz. She’s able to connect with his thoughts and wit and discovers her “sunny” husband suffered from crushing self-doubt about his career, but looked upon his marriage as his refuge.
Like Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” this is a deeply personal portrait of surviving loss and grief. Brooks poignantly captures the emotional and even practical precarity of life in the aftermath. During Covid lockdown, she edges her way back to writing to complete what would become the acclaimed novel, “Horse” — a project she tried to abandon that Horwitz urged her to finish — and dedicates it to his memory. For Brooks, the telling of “Memorial Days” is her way to “take control of the narrative of your life,” and to recognize that one doesn’t fill the void of death as much as build a life around it.
