Wondrous Leaving explores love and alienation
Roxana Robinson's stunning new novel, Leaving, cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet.
The curtain opens on intermission at a New York performance of the opera Tosca. Divorced, 60-year-old art curator Sarah recognizes Boston-based architect Warren, also 60. The pair dated in their youth; Warren is now long-married. But past feelings resurface — this time, more complicatedly.
The two have dinner, thrilled to find themselves in perfect sync as seasoned adults; their tastes, passions and accrued wisdom collude and complement. A delicious, mature love ignites.
Realizing that he and Sarah cannot relinquish each other, Warren dutifully sets about seeking a divorce from Janet, the hopelessly off-key wife he has patiently squired for 34 years. He is conflicted about leaving Janet. “Irrationally, he feels bereft. He is losing her.” He wants to “make her understand, so she'll take his side. But he can't tell her the truth.” Worse, he risks permanently alienating his beloved only child, Kat, a wilful, volatile grown daughter whose resulting rage is implacable.
Robinson, whose previous books include Dawson's Fall (2019) and Cost (2008), is a world-class noticer, delivering observations in sentences that are shapely and sensuous yet brisk. Kat, Warren realizes, “is part of him . ... He can't sever it from himself, he can't be severed. He can't lose her.” Broad strokes give way to finessed particulars — weather, landscapes, food, paintings, books, music. Robinson brings readers inside the heads of her leads and their supporting ensembles: their growing up “in the same community outside Philadelphia ... everyone connected by kin or friendship.”
Sarah and Warren narrate their own stories in turn, and the full arcs of their long experience are infused with Robinson's broad intelligence. So much is addressed head-on, unflinchingly: art's import; architecture's potential. Politics, too. The novel is set during the Obama years, and Warren touchingly insists the president is “doing a great job,” convinced that “democracy will hold.” Robinson captures child-bearing ordeals — horrifying, riveting — and graphic snapshots of the relentless vigils of caring for kids. All the good questions seep through. What do we owe whom, when allegiances are torn?
Yes, these characters are cosseted by money. Robinson is calmly frank about it. When Warren visits a powerful client in a highrise office: “One whole wall is glass ... The view itself — the height, the bright boats, the pale green statue, the sizzling blue water — is a wealth signifier, like a sable coat.” Though Sarah recalls an era when she had to put back groceries she couldn't pay for, in present tense she and Warren don't ask about prices; one imagines that their homes resemble old advertisements for Cutty Sark. But their socioeconomic niche enables and defines the principle of honour so central to this narrative; it frees them to zero in on questions of moral debt embedded in their identities.