THE FUTURE OF LOVE By Shirley Abbott.

Brownstoners

By CLAIRE DEDERER
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
published March 16, 2008

Like most readers, I know too much about New York. I live on a mountaintop in Colorado, and yet I know that on the streets of Manhattan Maclaren baby strollers are becoming passé. How do I know this? Because New York pours into my house through newspapers, magazines and novels. That overexposure puts heavy demands on the author of the Manhattan novel. So many people know so much about New York life that each detail must be spot-on, note-perfect. Which is to say, I wish Shirley Abbott hadn’t set her wise, funny, generous first novel, “The Future of Love,” in New York.

Abbott, author of the celebrated memoir “The Bookmaker’s Daughter,” has assembled a multigenerational cast. Mark Adler has lost his job and found adulterous love with his child’s preschool teacher. His wife, Maggie, works as a book editor and worries about food additives. Maggie’s mom, Antonia, a former radical, is having an affair with Sam, a publishing executive. Sam’s wife, Edith, cloisters herself at the couple’s country estate, sexless as a nun. They’re all caught short by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Although everyone continues much as before, their major weaknesses have suddenly been exposed.

Both before and after 9/11, Abbott’s people pursue love and goodness in equal measure. They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around. They’re deeply, amusingly ethical about small things, especially when it comes to food: “With her, it was a moral imperative to be lactose intolerant,” observes Sam. Antonia, meanwhile, is baffled by the younger generation’s obsession with organic produce and environmental cleanliness, “this determination not to dirty up the world or be dirtied up by it.”

Antonia is by far the most interesting character. The perspective of this aging, widowed lefty is deeply idiosyncratic, whether she’s discovering AARP sex with Sam or marveling at what she calls her “strange green conservative” of a daughter. Antonia is real and fresh, believably surprising.

But when Abbott abandons Antonia’s perspective the novel is less convincing. Abbott’s younger people talk and think like old people — or like the younger people of a bygone era. The book opens with Mark sitting on a park bench admiring his 4-year-old daughter: “His little Toni was a picture in a dotted-Swiss sundress.” Dotted Swiss is a muslinlike fabric that was popular in the middle of the 20th century. It has been resurrected in the current fad for retro-chic children’s clothes, but it’s far from a common term, and I find it hard to believe that Toni’s 40-year-old father would know what it’s called. When I asked my husband, who’s roughly the same vintage, he thought dotted Swiss was something you’d eat for lunch.

Meanwhile, Toni’s mother, Maggie, worries about one of her authors, who’s nursing a cocaine habit. “ ‘Bolivian marching powder,’ he called it.” Couldn’t an editor have gently explained to Abbott that no one has used this term since Jay McInerney’s protagonist hoovered the stuff in “Bright Lights, Big City,” back in 1984?

I’m not teasing out a few isolated instances: these false notes and anachronisms abound. Good novels discipline us to recognize character through fine points. The form Abbott has chosen — the Manhattan comedy of manners — demands a constant supply of ruthlessly exact detail in order to place characters socially, economically and even emotionally. Abbott gets a lot right: She 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. But it’s the truth in the details that gets away from her.


Claire Dederer is a contributor to the Arts & Leisure section of The Times.