Roorbach’s Remedy a tale of lost souls, survival, truth

Bill Roorbach’s The Remedy for Love (Algonquin, $24.95) is a deceptively simple little novel. It begins in a small-town Maine grocery store on the eve of some significant winter weather — what the TV people are calling “the storm of the century.”

Eric is a somewhat self- impressed local lawyer (albeit one with “no clients” because his progressive politics don’t jibe with his community’s conservatism) who’s looking forward to a rare visit from his estranged wife, Alison.

Alison, also a lawyer, technically hasn’t broken up with him. But she has decamped to the state capital, ostensibly for professional reasons, although Eric suspects she has a personal interest in one of the legislators.

While he’s waiting in line to pay for his upscale groceries, the makings of a supper that he hopes will re-endear him to his wife (if she shows up), Eric notices a disheveled and ragged young woman with a limp struggling to pay for her groceries. She’s miscalculated, she doesn’t have enough money. Eric feels “something rumbling inside him” and covers the difference; when he spots her outside struggling with her bags in the snowy parking lot, he offers her a ride, which she reluctantly accepts.

It turns out she’s living — prob-

ably squatting — in a cabin a ways off the main road by a river. Eric helps her to her door. He starts to drive away, but — realizing that she’s woefully unprepared for the coming storm — he makes his way back down the path to turn up somewhat creepily at her door again, offering some of his own high-end groceries. She is quite properly freaked out and hostile. But Eric feels some responsibility for her, and goes about trying to prepare her hovel for the coming blizzard. Only after he has stocked her woodpile does he leave. And when he gets to the roadway, he finds his car has been towed away — along with his cellphone. It’s four miles back to town, night is falling and it’s getting colder. After trying to break into a nearby (and impenetrable) animal clinic, he goes back to the cabin, to the woman who told him her name was “Danielle, for now.”

He makes his case, and she lets him in — and soon external events assure that their mutual maroonment is sealed.

Luckily they have wine — Eric has brought a couple of pricey bottles he’d intended for his reunion with Alison — while Danielle had bought a couple of boxes of cheap red. And they have stories to tell each other as they predictably become foxhole buddies. Neither of them has had a good year.

Aside from this novel, the only work of Roorbach I remember is Life Among Giants, his sprawling 2013 novel about a 6-foot-8-inch pro quarterback known as Lizard who grew up across the street from a palatial estate owned by a great ballerina and her rock-star husband. While hardly a perfect novel, there was such a wonderful abundance of story in Giants (which fittingly is being made into an HBO miniseries) that it sometimes read as a deli- cious pastiche of The Great Gatsby and The World According to Garp.

The Remedy for Love feels like a studied reaction to that book, a purposefully miniaturized novel that nevertheless strains toward (and nearly achieves) profundity as the conversation touches on climate change, provincial cruelty and the collateral damage of needless wars. While the ever-mellow, ever fatuous Eric remains a bit of a cipher, a self-impressed manque who can’t quite understand why his women keep leaving him, Danielle is a strange and mysterious creature with a heartbreaking delicacy. There is an emotional truth to Roorbach’s rendering of her, and I suspect he was driven to write the book just to sustain her character.

If so, that is reason enough.

Far be it from me to say that I’m unimpressed by Martin Amis’ latest, The Zone of Interest (Knopf, $26.95). It’s likely a book I’ll return to after a while and that I may even learn to love. It took me three tries to get more than 20 pages into Jack Butler’s Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock, but I busted through some hermetic seal on that third attempt and now it’s one of my favorite books.

Amis is one of my favorite authors, although I have to admit that the first pages of this one felt gray and heavy as well as completely beside the point. The premise of the book seems deliberately (and perhaps childishly) provocative: It’s about the possibilities of love between Nazi bureaucrats overseeing the death camp at Auschwitz. On the other hand, Amis did write the invaluable Time’s Arrow. Although I was one of the few critics who seemed to enjoy his last novel, Lionel Asbo, I like the idea of him returning to a difficult, if not impossible, subject.

Holocaust fatigue is a real and dangerous ailment. Amis is a serious writer who is among our very best (when he’s not being a complete jackass). This is a book I need to read. But not right now. All I can do is take notice of the book’s publication. A major author has released a major book.