Leaving

November 13, 2023
Robinson (Sparta) once again examines the moral behavior of family members and lovers in her adroit if schematic latest. Decades have passed since Sarah, a late-middle-aged divorced museum curator, last saw her college sweetheart Warren. They meet again at an opera in New York City and, though Warren is married now, they begin an affair, acknowledging what a mistake it was to have parted all those years ago. When Warren leaves his wife, Janet, their 20-something daughter, Kat, is furious at him and emotionally blackmails Warren by threatening to bar him from her wedding and future grandchildren unless he breaks things off with Sarah. Eventually, Warren decides he’s morally obligated to return to his wife, and he splits with Sarah. Several years pass, and Sarah settles into life without Warren, while he withers in the shadow of his unforgiving daughter. Robinson writes skillfully and sensitively about Sarah’s feeling for her children and grandchildren, and about her daughter’s agony and terror of childbirth, but Warren, infuriatingly weak and curiously inarticulate in the face of Kat’s haranguing, seems no more than a vehicle for Robinson’s story. This bleak outing offers glimmers of the author’s past greatness but doesn’t reach the same heights.

Starred review from January 1, 2024
Forty years after their breakup, lovers run into each other at intermission in the opera house, and nothing will ever be the same. Warren Jennings and Sarah Watson dated in their youth, but between the miles separating their colleges, a silly but fatal misunderstanding, and a new face on the horizon, she chose to end the relationship. By the time they reconnect, he is long married, living near Boston, a successful architect. She is divorced, a grandmother, on her own in Westchester County. After they serendipitously meet at a performance of Tosca in New York City, the error of their separation is quickly evident and they begin an affair. To them, it feels less like adultery than a course correction, likely to lead to the greater happiness of all. But as Warren will one day explain to his wife, Janet, "In an opera, the tragedy involves passion and honor," and so it is here, with passion and honor at odds, and the irrevocable responsibilities and emotions of parenthood complicating the situation in unforeseen ways. "They're sort of at the heart of everything now," says Sarah, speaking of her adult children. "...We're marginal. At sixty." "But that's not how I feel," Warren replies, his whole being rekindled by the force of this unexpected, ferocious emotion. Every character and relationship in the two families is beautifully drawn, in sentences that manage to be both spare and rich at once. Also in play is the power of art to give our lives shape and meaning: Tosca, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, and the paintings of the Bloomsbury Group add texture to the story. As the novel builds toward its operatic conclusion, Robinson's profound, complex depiction of family relationships and responsibilities and the difficult choices they entail will resonate with readers in every phase of their own lives. Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth. A triumph.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2024
Life seldom offers a second chance at love, and it rarely delivers up a third. But for former lovers Sarah and Warren, who broke up impetuously in college, a chance meeting rekindles all the old feelings. Now some 40 years later, they're able to pick up as if it's just later the same day. Their conversations are comfortable, their intimacy ardent. Sarah is divorced from Rob, her rebound relationship. Warren is still mired in his "seemed like a good idea at the time" marriage to Janet. Both have grown daughters. Even though Warren lives in Boston and Sarah outside New York, they embark on an affair. Geography will not be the only obstacle. When Warren tells Janet he is leaving her, their daughter launches a fierce campaign of emotional blackmail that eventually guilts Warren into returning to his marriage. Both Warren and Sarah are left emotionally unmoored and forced to confront primal questions. Is love truly unconditional if obligations are attached? When does responsibility to oneself outweigh that to others? With searing perception and genuine empathy, Robinson (Dawson's Fall, 2019) captures the fraught nuances of complicated family dynamics, treating the spurned-lover trope with gentleness and compassion.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.