“This Is a Love Story”
Jessica Soffer
Dutton, $29
Jane remembers when they first met, back in 1967. She was waitressing her way through Cooper Union and Abe was fresh out of Wharton, unimaginatively following in his father’s footsteps. He was lunching with a client at Tavern on the Green when he first saw her. Jane set down his deviled eggs and Abe noticed paint on her wrist. “You must be very good,” he tells her. She is.
Now Abe is at his dear Jane’s bedside, her long battle with cancer drawing to an inevitable end. “Some days, you want to tell me everything that you remember.” Some nights, too.
Jane remembers their early courtship, their brownstone, and their blossoming careers. Abe writes it all down: “You remember, in the beginning, how much we talked about art.” She remembers early motherhood: “You remember that every night, between bottles, I’d try to hold you.”
Her memories spark his and as they remember together, the love they fought for over so many years comes into focus. Eventually this story shifts from a “we” story of a wife and husband reminiscing together, to that of a woman and a man telling their own side of things. Each sharing their deepest, most personal regrets and joys over the course of an enduring marriage.
The titular story in Jessica Soffer’s “This Is a Love Story” belongs to Abe and Jane, but they’re not the only ones remembering. There’s also their son, Max, and Abe’s former student Alice. And Central Park.
There’s something about multi-character narratives that makes them wildly appealing. Feeling seen, being listened to, isn’t that what we all want? What better gift could an author give her beloved characters than the chance to state their case from their perspective? Jessica Soffer clearly loves her characters, showers each with empathy galore.
“Alice. I can barely recall her,” Abe assures himself. Alice, however, does recall her married writing professor. She’s kept detailed receipts in the form of a diaristic 52-page essay. Ms. Soffer has chosen to relay Alice’s account of their entanglement in the polarizing second-person narrative voice, casting the reader as Alice.
Alice scrutinizes and strategizes about herself/the reader: “You haven’t had a full meal in weeks”; “. . . there is a special thing you can do with your eyes. Do it.” There are a few good reasons second-voice narration is rare in fiction, the most obvious is that many readers find the constant barrage of “you” overwhelming. Sometimes it can feel like reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, without the choices. Or a Lumon Compliance Handbook. “You will be rewarded incrementally based on the percentage you have achieved.”
Fortunately, second-person narrative is more tolerable than usual here. From anyone else’s perspective, Alice is an outsider who threatens our beloved Abe and Jane. But Ms. Soffer knows how to drum up compassion for even her most despicable characters. By forcing the reader to step inside Alice’s head it’s more difficult to dismiss the young coed as a mere interloper: “Has anyone ever looked at you like that?” Casting the reader as Alice has the effect of making the reader feel a bit complicit in the whole matter. Clever.
Then there’s Jane and Abe’s grown son, Max. One of his many former girlfriends, a therapist, tells him, “It isn’t healthy, the way you behave. Childhood aside.” Jane has given him mommy issues so serious he suffers from chronic ambivalence, unable to connect or commit to any woman. Even the ones he loves. And, perhaps more damningly, he’s become a wildly successful art dealer (if it’s not one thing, it’s the mother) who can barely find a few hours to visit her deathbed. Despite his ascendant career, he’s stuck and “he knows he should do something else. He cannot.”
After Abe and Jane’s, the next most significant love story in this novel is the one between the author and Central Park, “a beating heart, an adagio, a dreamy parenthesis.” Ms. Soffer has cast the park as a sort of Greek chorus filled with humorous vignettes, mostly unrelated to the rest of the novel. There’s enough park history to warrant a thank-you to the Central Park Conservancy in the acknowledgements. Readers who share Ms. Soffer’s love of Central Park will not be disappointed.
Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman in White,” published in 1860, is considered the first multi-narrative novel. It took until the end of the 20th century for the genre to take off, but now it seems like every other new novel is told from at least two, if not 10, perspectives, and why not? If the experts are right and reading fiction increases one’s empathy, it follows that the more characters we connect with, the more our tolerance for multi-perspectivism.
Oprah and Reese love sweeping, intertwining stories told from various points of view as much as prestigious literary juries do. Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for “Beloved.” So did Olga Tokarczuk for her 992-page “The Books of Jacob.” Jennifer Egan was awarded a Pulitzer for “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which has at least 14 different narrators. Colum McCann, Tommy Orange, Isabel Allende, and David Mitchell do multi-perspectives exceptionally well. And for the reader searching for a love story told with . . . love, Jessica Soffer does, too.
Jessica Soffer is the author of “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.” She lives in Sag Harbor.
Heidi Neurauter lives on Shelter Island.