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"This is the story of Henry and me. I wish it had a different end," Sylvia Landsman begins what is, in part, the story of her ill-fated romance.
Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia escapes to Italy where she meets Henry, a middle-aged expatriate. Henry lives a tony life for which he pays a steep price: the chance to be happy. With his wife's money bankrolling a grand tour, Henry and Sylvia travel a circuitous route. Sylvia entertains Henry with stories which unfold into stories of her peculiar family, her damaged friends, Alma Mahler, dead ducks.
A tapestry of remembrances and regrets, these narrative threads foreshadow Sylvia's shame: through a small, cowardly sin of omission, she betrayed her best friend. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something brave, the haunting refrain of "if only" leaves Sylvia with one more story of love lived, and lost.
As ever in Binnie Kirshenbaum's work, the compassion and care for her deeply flawed characters is palpable, and her writing is fresh, dark, despairing, and hilarious.
Review:
Binnie Kirshenbaum's new novel looks like another year in Provence or another romance baked under the Tuscan sun. It begins with a recession fantasy: A middle-age, divorced woman gets laid off but uses her severance money for a trip to Italy. There, as usually happens, she strikes up a conversation with a handsome millionaire at a cafe and spends the rest of the summer driving around Europe with him,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) staying in the cutest inns and savoring the finest wines. Given this setup, you'd expect the cover of "The Scenic Route" to show a shirtless steroid-abuser embracing a mildly resistant lingerie model in a ripening vineyard. But in this case, the opening is something of a bait-and-switch, and the switch is far better than the bait. Sylvia Landsman's tour of Europe turns out to be just a thin frame on which Kirshenbaum hangs several generations of family stories. Florence, Prague and Slovenia whiz by as they take "the scenic route ... loop-de-loop and fast, as if we were in hot pursuit of a horsefly." Every few days, Sylvia points randomly at the map, and they're off again, but this isn't a travelogue, and we don't hear much about each town. "Once you've seen it, you've seen it," Sylvia shrugs. "We didn't catch sight of much scenery other than deja vu-type sensations of evergreen trees and garden gnomes." Fortunately, her hunky new companion, Henry, is a good listener, the perfect audience, in fact, for a woman who wants to talk her way across the Continent. If there's a movie version of "The Scenic Route," the actor who plays Henry won't have to memorize more than a page of dialogue. The hard-to-believe pleasure of this novel depends entirely upon the wit and poignancy of Sylvia's digressive patter — a Jewish woman's version of Colson Whitehead's recent "Sag Harbor." Her quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic stories flow one after another, anecdotes nested in anecdotes, interrupted by asides and parenthetical observations, and punctuated by historical footnotes about Shalimar perfume, Raisinets or martinis. I can't imagine what Kirshenbaum told people who asked, "So, what's your novel about?" and yet it's continually engaging, the illusion of artlessness that only the disciplined artist can carry off. We hear of the neighbor girl who accidentally decapitates her own mother, the uncle whose hands wander too far, the friend who decides to get out of debt by borrowing $10,000 for dance lessons at Arthur Murray. Making love to Henry during a lightning storm in Austria reminds Sylvia of Great Aunt Hannah getting shock treatment in New York, which sparks the tale of Luigi Galvani in 18th-century Bologna discovering the electrical nature of frogs' nerves. The Autobahn can't match Sylvia's winding, high-speed narrative, delivered in prose that mimics all the detours and incongruities of the spoken word. "We were alone, the two of us, in his car, driving through Tuscany; alone, the two of us, in a world of our own design, a world not unlike the desktop biosphere you can buy at Sharper Image. Or a snow dome. Other people? Who were they to us? Other people, they were the stuff of stories to tell; they were the characters who populated our stories." Much of what Sylvia describes involves herself: the quiet dissolution of her passionless marriage, her dangerous neglect of a close friend. But other stories, drawn from the sepia past, sound more like fables. There's the great-grandfather who invented shampoo and another who left home, "someplace like Fiddler-on-the-Roofville, Poland, with a handful of zlotys in his pocket, and all alone he set sail for America." Aunt Thea dropped out of Vassar during the Depression to marry the son of a wealthy family that kept their lives stagnating for decades. Sylvia's namesake, Aunt Semille, escaped the Holocaust and came to New York with stories meant to obliterate the past rather than preserve it. But that, too, is all part of this thoughtful meditation on the way we construct our lives. Sylvia reminds us that storytellers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. "More often than not," she admits, "we don't know what really happened, and what we say happened is more likely to be a reconstruction of events rather than a restoration. We imagine as much as we remember." Early in their road trip, Sylvia asks Henry somewhat defensively, "Does there have to be a point to a story?" Clearly, she's speaking for her creator, chair of the graduate writing program at Columbia University. Kirshenbaum wants us to understand that there doesn't have to be a point, but that doesn't mean a story is pointless. Something serious is happening beneath Sylvia's chronic gabbiness. "Like Scheherazade," she says, "we all tell stories as a means of staying alive," and that's a theme this novel returns to in a variety of thoughtful ways. One of the most touching ones takes place in a New York hospital when a neurologist advises Sylvia to tell her father old family tales as a way of rebuilding his damaged memory. It's a poignant reversal of the way Sylvia began her life, captivated by her father's bedtime stories, even as her mother told them to turn off the light: "Conspirators, my father and I, and he lowered his voice because you can't leave off a story just at the point when, from off in the distance, Little Sylvia hears the howl of the wolves." Kirshenbaum has endowed her narrator with the raconteur's greatest gift, that sense of imminent revelation that keeps us from wondering, "Are we there yet?" Spiked with wit, scrubbed free of sentimentality, these tales of love and loss, courage and cowardice, transport us back into the pages of our own lives and our own families. "There is cruelty to memory," Sylvia says, "the way there is an ache after a dream." So true, and just the sort of insight that makes this bittersweet novel a perfect companion for summer. Ron Charles can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"The Scenic Route is a witty and poignant, and also an extremely interesting and acute, novel. Ms. Kirshenbaum mines a very rich seam that's entirely her own. This is first-rate writing by a novelist who gracefully defies classification." Richard Ford
Review:
"I'm much impressed with Binnie Kirshenbaum's The Scenic Route, an idiosyncratic and totally winning 'romance,' in which sentiment and cynicism are poised in a most virtuoso performance." Joyce Carol Oates
Review:
"Kirshenbaum's distinctive voice transforms a lightly plotted novel into an enchanting, tangent-strewn meditation on memory, love and luck... Lovely prose and quirky observations carry Kirshenbaum's seventh novel." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Absurdly underrated Kirshenbaum is at her darkly comic and boldly encompassing best here, diverting us with hairpin-turn humor while slipping us hard truths about memory and inheritance, betrayal and guilt, and the inevitable end of the road." Booklist
Synopsis:
Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent—as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. Her narrative is a tapestry of remembrances and regrets...and her secret shame: a small, cowardly sin of omission. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something small but brave, the refrain "if only" returns to haunt her, leaving Sylvia with one more story of love lived and lost.
Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of An Almost Perfect Moment, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, Pure Poetry, Hester Among the Ruins, and History on a Personal Note. She is a professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she is chair of the Graduate Writing Program.
bbrrtt1, July 30, 2010 (view all comments by bbrrtt1)
Also recently read, "The scenic route", this book I liked a little less than Molly Marx mainly due to the acerbic humor and dispassionate references. I did enjoy the method of storytelling that Kirshenbaum weaves, a tale of family, best friend, love and loss. The protagonist in Kirshenbaums story, Sylvia Landsman, is less likable than Molly Marx and I couldn't imaging her being my friend but the story is engaging and if you can get past her biting tongue it's a fairly good read.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (5 of 11 readers found this comment helpful)
What an interesting, complex character has the author created in the person of Sylvia Landsman. At age forty-two, life to this point has been disappointing for Sylvia. Having previously initiated a split in a pleasant-enough marriage, she heads to Europe for an extended vacation after being laid off with severance pay.
Embarking on an almost random journey around Europe, stopping at out-of-the-way places, with Henry, an American southerner who she meets early on, in his Peugeot gives Sylvia a chance to reflect on her life and perhaps satisfy vague yearnings. Henry, a well-to-do man now living in Paris, with wide latitude in an undemanding marriage, accustomed to a leisurely life of fine wine and food, is the perfect sort to listen to Sylvia as she roams back through her life, especially generations of her family. Invariably, subtle insights about life flow from her stories and memories.
In some ways, Sylvia is an elusive individual. It would be hard to describe her physical being. We know her though her contemplations of life. Henry is there to offer the encouraging word at appropriate intervals, pick good restaurants, and represent faint possibilities. One could complain that keeping track of the many relatives gets a bit burdensome. Overall the book flows pretty well and, most importantly, is definitely thought-provoking – worth a reread.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (10 of 17 readers found this comment helpful)
easyreeder, May 26, 2009 (view all comments by easyreeder)
Kirshenbaum, in The Scenic Route, suspends thought with a jagged yet metronomic prose. The meditation is all at once sage and naive, cynical and hopeful, transformative and regressive--a difficult polyphony. And Kirshenbaum: the maestro.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (15 of 21 readers found this comment helpful)
"Review"
by Richard Ford,
"The Scenic Route is a witty and poignant, and also an extremely interesting and acute, novel. Ms. Kirshenbaum mines a very rich seam that's entirely her own. This is first-rate writing by a novelist who gracefully defies classification."
"Review"
by Joyce Carol Oates,
"I'm much impressed with Binnie Kirshenbaum's The Scenic Route, an idiosyncratic and totally winning 'romance,' in which sentiment and cynicism are poised in a most virtuoso performance."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"Kirshenbaum's distinctive voice transforms a lightly plotted novel into an enchanting, tangent-strewn meditation on memory, love and luck... Lovely prose and quirky observations carry Kirshenbaum's seventh novel."
"Review"
by Booklist,
"Absurdly underrated Kirshenbaum is at her darkly comic and boldly encompassing best here, diverting us with hairpin-turn humor while slipping us hard truths about memory and inheritance, betrayal and guilt, and the inevitable end of the road."
"Synopsis"
by Harper Collins,
Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent—as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. Her narrative is a tapestry of remembrances and regrets...and her secret shame: a small, cowardly sin of omission. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something small but brave, the refrain "if only" returns to haunt her, leaving Sylvia with one more story of love lived and lost.
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