This is a Love Story

For someone who’s been leery about literary fiction for the past six months I have two novels this week that epitomize the genre and what I love about it.

This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer
Published by Dutton
Publication date: February 04, 2025
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary

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With Central Park as the backdrop, This is a Love Story unfolds in alternating chapters from the novel’s three main characters: Abe, Jane and Max. Abe and Jane are creatives—he’s a writer and she’s an artist and they have been in love for 50 years. Max is their son. The Park itself is an ancillary character, the set piece within which most of their important moments occur. Now, Jane is dying and Abe takes her there as often as he can narrating their past in an effort to keep her present.

Abe is the first voice heard in This is a Love Story as he pulls pieces of their history forward like shiny baubles to tempt the fading Jane. Author Jessica Soffer makes the interesting choice to write his chapters in the first and second person with I remember or You remember starting every sentence. This cadence exerts an initial pull with its repetition, but the switching back-and-forth between the two paragraph by paragraph ultimately leaves the reader locked behind glass, remote, as if looking at dioramas in a museum. By 20% I was struggling, but then the novel switches to an intermission in Central Park. This happens throughout This is a Love Story, as if the park is a palate cleanser, preparing the reader for the next course.

The next course being their son Max whose kinetic energy surges onto the page in the way his father’s discourse did not. Max is terse, abrupt, all sharp edges and surface tension as he navigates a successful career as an art gallery owner. He is at once highly self-aware of his flaws, but unable to or interested in changing himself. Everything learned about him is thrown off as an aside, including his discomfort with his mother’s illness.

Jane is the last to speak in This is a Love Story, but once she appears it’s as if the novel’s heart starts to beat. Whereas Abe and Max tell the story of their lives together Jane’s chapters show her life. Soffer’s gift with words shines as the men’s declarative statements or cerebral sparring now transform into the rawness of emotions, thoughts, the viscera of existing.  Jane’s prodigious talent, her creative force is so strong it can’t be stopped. Everything around her—flora, fauna, paint, household items, clay, and even string—all contain art waiting to be coaxed forth by her discerning eye and careful hands. Until she has Max and finds herself empty, hollowed out with nothing left for her new son. She, who overflowed with originality and life force, loses both to postpartum depression and then the early symptoms of her cancer. This is painful reading as it runs counter to everything a mother “should” be and its impact drives deep.

So much emotional terrain is covered in this delicate novel it forced me to release the mental brake of ‘what happens next?’ and allow myself to simply be with the words as they appeared on the page. Lines like

…she’s got gray eyes that she opens and closes as if they’ve got better things to do.

tossed off with nonchalance are the kind of writing that thrills me. A single sentence that could easily be missed yet when strung together into paragraphs and then pages alchemizes into the soul of a profound love affair. Everything Abe and Jane mean to each other is laid bare on the page.

It sounds off-putting to equate a novel to a piece of art, but I’ll go there with This is a Love Story. I’ve re-read entire chapters just to sink back into the rhythm of the words. Even if some of the structure felt disjointed early on, a tender beauty surfaced that rendered the story extraordinary. The mundane, the minutia, the momentous, the tragic, all of life encapsulated in words, each perfectly chosen and carefully set in place, allowing total immersion in the fullness of these cherished, imperfect lives.

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*I received a free copy of this book from Dutton Books in exchange for an honest review.*

 

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