‘Leaving’ by Roxana Robinson (2024) – 327 pages
In ‘Leaving’, Sarah is nearing sixty and she has two grown-up kids, daughter Meg and son Josh. She has been divorced for many years. At an opera, ‘Tosca’, she runs into an old boyfriend from college, Warren. He is still married. He wants to see her again, and she agrees to go out with him.
“The restaurant is small, French, not grand. A long narrow room, a mirror along one side. A sense of Gallic festiveness. He’s in a booth in the back, watching for her. When she comes in he raises his hand and smiles; she feels a lift, a warming.”
On their date, she winds up spending the night with him, leaving his hotel room bed in the morning.
This tale of late love between these two upper-upper middle class people is very elegant and tasteful, but it could have used some lightness. It is essentially humorless. We never find out what the real attraction between Sarah and Warren is besides that they are both well-to-do. She lives outside New York City, and he lives in Boston. These characters are endlessly polite, but there seems to be little real feeling between them.
The affair between Warren and Sarah progresses, and Warren asks his wife Janet for a divorce. Sarah is quite happy with her independent single life and does not want to move from her large estate. Warren’s grown daughter Katrina is angry with him.
“On the phone he had felt Katrina’s rage like a blast furnace, a big open maw. He has never felt such rage. She would welcome his destruction.”
What ‘Leaving’ does have going for it is verisimilitude. Each word and action of each of these characters is plausible. These well-to-do characters behave entirely like we expect them to and their dialogue is realistic. However, besides Warren’s angry daughter, there is very little passion in this novel.
There is a lot of domestic description and detail in this novel, more than is necessary and more than was wanted by this reader. I’m sure Sarah’s dog Bella is a nice dog and is fun to play with, but I don’t need pages devoted to the dog’s antics.
We get little sense that this couple, Warren and Sarah, are nearing sixty. I suppose today sixty isn’t all that old, but still there could have been a few references to the problems and unexpected joys of aging.
Grade : B-
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