Sorting Out Romantic, Marital and Familial Relationships in Literature

This post is a review of Leaving: A Novel. By Roxana Robinson. W.W. Norton & Company. 327 pp. $28.99.

As Leaving, Roxana Robinson’s seventh novel opens, Sarah Blackwell, a college student, has decided to break up with Warren, her longtime boyfriend. The “proximate cause,” she subsequently explains, was Warren’s request that she accompany him on a trip behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, when Communists often arrested American visitors as spies, the plan – and reports that he had been fired from his job for bad behavior (that later proved to be untrue) – convinced Sarah that Warren was foolish and reckless.

Warren didn’t know what hit him, but the two went their separate ways. Sarah married, had two children, divorced, lived in suburban New York and worked as an art curator. An architect in Boston, Warren was married, with one daughter.

Decades later, Sarah and Warren ran into each other on the staircase at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. They quickly realized they were still in love.

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In Leaving, Robinson provides a credible, insightful, and often poignant examination of the practical and moral implications of their decision to live the rest of their lives together.

Leaving is not without flaws. Robinson takes on too many topics, including Obama-era politics and “woke” ideology. The plot has more twists and turns than a colonoscopy. And Robinson sometimes tells readers what she has already shown them. Following one of many painful conversations between Warren and Katrina, his daughter, for example, Robinson writes, “She’s polite but distant. Between them is a gap he can’t close.”

That said, Leaving is full of insights about the ambiguities, demands, and mysteries attached to passion, love, and commitment. And of many perceptions and “truths” that are too unbearable for decent people to say or even think.

Sarah, we learn, wishes that Edith Wharton had provided a different ending to The Age of Innocence, her novel about adulterous lovers. These days, Sarah notes, honor and renunciation have given way to self-actualization and happiness. Protecting Warren’s marriage, she tells herself, is not her responsibility, all the more so because he and Janet are not at all compatible. Divorce, moreover, “has become such a commonplace, it has almost lost its moral gravitas.”

Sarah also recognizes that in seeing and sleeping with Warren, she sets aside her principled refusal to go out with married men. She is unable to justify that decision. Even as she wakes up every day grieving how things are turning out for her, Sarah acknowledges that for Warren to follow through on his promise to leave Janet would be selfish and cruel. Equally painful, Sarah feels that the solicitous concern expressed by her own daughter has changed the dynamic of their relationship. No longer the invincible mom and congenitally uncomfortable with intimacy, Robinson writes, a feeling that was “partly gratitude and partly loneliness” swept over her.

Meanwhile, as Sarah resists pressure from him to sell the house in which she raised her children, move to Boston and commute to work, Warren struggles to reconcile what he’s done and is doing to his self-image as someone who does not renege on promises or knowingly cause pain. He realizes the hollowness of his claim to Kat that he’s not breaking up the family because it was already broken, “not broken, but… dispersed.” And he is terrified by Kat’s threat to cease contact with him forever if he leaves Janet.

When he and Janet see a therapist, Warren declares they are deeply incompatible, with different ideas about “books, about politics, about everything.” Asked for an example, Warren can’t bring himself to discuss her ignorance or her preoccupation with things that don’t matter. He doesn’t say that “being with her makes him feel like a tethered goat.” Or that he winces at the way she chews and laughs. Instead, Warren makes a fool of himself by telling Dr. Klein that Janet “thinks France started World War.” When the session ends, he apologizes to Janet and tells himself he will “never do this again.” Warren realizes, however, that his wife, the daughter he adores, and Dr. Klein, “with her gravelly voice,” are subverting his prospects for a happy life.

Much to her credit, Roxanne Robinson refuses to provide her readers with easy answers or a Dickensian ending. At one point, Janet tells Warren that her club has chosen the book Family Secrets for its next meeting. It’s not great literature, she says, but club members prefer entertaining escapes from the real world. “That’s what a book should do,” replies Warren, who hates this Groundhog Day conversation. “Take you away from your world.”