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The Future of Love
by Shirley Abbott
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Synopses & Reviews Set in New York in 2001, Abbott's debut novel invites us into the lives of good people grappling with the hard choices and the sacrifices they must make to find love. In the manner of a contemporary Edith Wharton, Shirley Abbott exposes the inner lives and the tangled relationships of eight charactersand#8212;before and after New York's tragedyand#8212;and forces both them and the reader to see the world in a new way. Having assembled a smart, compelling ensemble, reminiscent of HBO's Six Feet Under, Abbott allows us to see the possibility of happiness even as the city itself is tested. With humor and profound empathy, she has crafted a novel that runs deep into the heart of our need for commitment from friends, lovers, and family. Review: "Shirley Abbott has written a pre- and post-9/11 novel here, set in the city of Manhattan. In the spirit of Hugh Nissenson's incredible 'The Days of Awe,' she puts together an extended set of family and friends, clustered more or less in the metropolis, oblivious to any possible Larger Picture, people intent on living out their own lives, until one day a couple of airliners smash into the World Trade ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Center. Then pieces of everything — buildings and lives — go flying, and settle down again into a different configuration. We first see Mark, an unemployed husband who takes his 4-year-old daughter to the park in the forlorn hope of encountering her nursery school teacher, on whom he has a crush. Mark is married to the rather dull Maggie, who's working her fingers to the proverbial bone trying to keep her family together. She's unlucky enough to have a vibrant, exciting, intellectually alert, physically attractive widowed mother, Antonia, who lives in a perfect New York apartment just a floor above a charming gay couple: Artie, who collects and sells autographs for a living; and Greg, who has been an accomplished dancer on the Broadway stage. Antonia has also raked up a boyfriend in his 70s, Sam, who's been married to the unimaginative Edith for many years. They, in turn, have an awful handful of grown children and, notably, a grandchild, Alison, who's formed a couple with Candace, an African American woman. The conflict here among all these characters is the age-old one between the hipsters and the squares. Edith, Sam's wife, is square to the point of being obtuse. She lives mostly alone out in the country on Sam's lavish estate. She won't talk at parties; she won't read books, even though her husband is a publisher. She's a dedicated Luddite and masters only enough of the computer to figure out that Sam has been cheating on her. Antonia's daughter, Maggie, is an anti-abortion dullard, convinced she can save her marriage to the morally challenged Mark by getting pregnant again. She's a workhorse, a donkey; she sees life as an endless round of domestic tribulation. Antonia, on the other hand, is a hipster to the max. She loves to cook fine dinners and hang out with her pals; she's enthusiastically orgasmic. When she tells her daughter about Sam, Maggie is shocked, but Antonia is not looking to be a home-wrecker. She's perfectly at home just the way she is, in her city, her life, her skin. And she's in love. Then 9/11 happens. Odious Mark (the unemployed husband with the crush on the schoolteacher) makes the quintessential male move. Like Nathanael West's Wakefield, like Dashiell Hammett's Flitcraft, he promptly pitches all his credit cards and his identification into the river and walks off the island of Manhattan to shack up with his honey baby. They'll have a lot of sex, he hopes, and then, when things calm down, take a bus out to the American West. Maggie, a one-trick pony throughout, manages to get pregnant. Greg, rather predictably since he's part of a gay couple, finds himself dying of AIDS. Sam, the married lover, having been found out by his odious, un-hip wife, decides to stay with her for the relatively unconvincing reason that he has promised to lend his lavish estate to Alison and Candace (the biracial lesbian couple, remember?) for an elaborate commitment ceremony a few months down the line. In effect, he chooses his property over taking his rightful place next to the warmhearted Antonia. Sam's wife, Edith, has been suitably melodramatic: 'You are welcome to a divorce if you want one. I will take this estate away from you, every acre of it. The house. Everything in it. The paintings. The china. Your eight-burner cookstove. All of it.' The author lost me somewhere around here. Because who could love a man who would choose his gardens and his cookstove over the splendiferous Antonia? 'The Future of Love' comes to an end with an elaborate set piece: the commitment ceremony of Alison and Candace. Sam's awful grown children, who have fought incessantly through long and trying pages, show up at the party and begin taking punches at each other. They make up, as one character suggests, 'a magnificent little microcosm of the American electorate,' but they look more like stereotypes in the author's elaborate scheme. And so are the gay couples stereotypical. And Sam's ghastly wife, Edith. And Maggie's ghastly husband, Mark. Only Antonia and Sam are considered as real human beings here, and Sam has been brutally twisted by the author before she gets done with him. None of them, strangely, takes time to think what the destruction of the towers might mean in the larger world. Depressingly, maybe the author is right about this. After the first shock, each character shrinks back into his or her personal drama. In this novel, in marked contrast to 'The Days of Awe,' the larger picture is too terrifying for any one person to grasp or even contemplate." Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: An andquot;impressive first novel . . . Abbott's nuanced take on New York after the fall is spot-on, reminding us that love is about survival as well as loss.andquot;---People, 3-star review Review: andquot;An elegiac paean to New York City. . . .Elegantly written, conveying an obvious love and despair for the city and its inhabitants.andquot;--Kirkus Review: andquot;An ensemble of New Yorkers swim the choppy waters of romance. Abbott weaves a delicate tapestry of love and apocalypse.andquot; andmdash;Publishers Weekly Review: A andquot;wise, funny, generous first novel . . . . [Abbott] elegantly weaves together her lovers' stories. She deftly pokes fun at what we call morality. She allows her characters to be both lovable and ugly.andquot;and#8212;New York Times About the Author Shirley Abbott is the author of three memoirs: The Bookmaker's Daughter: A Memory Unbound, which was reviewed on the cover of the New York TimesBook Review and was a New York TimesNotable Book; Love's Apprentice: The Romantic Education of a Modern Woman; and Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South. She has taught writing at Smith College and has lectured on memoir writing at many other colleges and universities. She has written numerous magazine articles, as well as books about the Smithsonian Museum and the historic houses of Charleston. The Future of Loveis her first novel.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781565125674
- Author:
- Abbott, Shirley
- Publisher:
- Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- FAMILY and RELATIONSHIPS / Interpersonal Relations
- Subject:
- FAMILY and RELATIONSHIPS / Death, Grief, Bereavement
- Subject:
- New york (n.y.)
- Subject:
- September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
- Subject:
- Psychological fiction
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Publication Date:
- March 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 306
- Dimensions:
- 8.5 x 5.5 in
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