The Future of Love

December 24, 2007
An ensemble of New Yorkers swim the choppy waters of romance, circa autumn 2001, in the first novel from memoirist Abbott (The Bookmaker’s Daughter
). Having lost his job at an investment firm before September 11, Mark Adler siphons off the pressure through an affair with Sophie, his daughter’s 25-year-old nursery school teacher. Mark’s older parallel is Sam Mendel, a retired publisher with a sexless marriage and a lavish estate in the country. Sam is resigned to his existence until he meets Mark’s mother-in-law, Antonia, and discovers a wholly unexpected erotic reincarnation. The limit to each affair is a devotion—Mark to his daughter, Sam to his estate—but even these are imperiled by 9/11. A deeply melancholic Mark exploits his location that morning (he was praying at Trinity Church before a job interview at the South Tower) to disappear and Sam puts his marriage and estate at risk by shacking up with Antonia downtown. Abbott pursues these and other plots—a lesbian commitment ceremony, a gay dancer’s fight with cancer—through third-person perspectives that tie up the interconnections in surprisingly effective strokes. Abbott weaves a delicate tapestry of love and apocalypse.

Starred review from February 15, 2008
Renownedmemoirist Abbott debuts as a novelist with a shrewd, polishedcomedy of manners. Beginning in Manhattan shortly before 9/11 and ending a year later, thiswitty yet weighty tale is told in eight distinct voices. Antonia, a canny, elegant widow, is trying to help herdaughter, who is saddled with a feckless and unfaithful husband, while also looking after her best friends: Greg, an ailing black dancer, and his devoted white lover, Arty. Sam, a famous literary mogul whose wife lives like a lonely queen in their lavish Catskillsestate, is in love with Antonia, while his granddaughter is in love with Gregs niece, and the two women plan a spectacular weddinglike commitment ceremony at Sams country manor. As dramatic complications and losses accrue, Abbott opens windows onto all that changes and all that remains the same in love, marriage, class, race, and family life, and considers truth as both a weapon and a key to liberation. Abbott reaches deep psychological strata as she parallels the shocking assault on New York with the ravages of disease and time on the body, and illuminates the fact that everything we construct to keep chaos and darkness at bay can be destroyed in an instant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)