The Future of Love: A Novel [Hardcover]

Shirley Abbott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2008

Set in New York in 2001, Abbott's debut novel invites us into the lives of good people grappling with the hard choices and the sacrifices they must make to find love. In the manner of a contemporary Edith Wharton, Shirley Abbott exposes the inner lives and the tangled relationships of eight characters—before and after New York's tragedy—and forces both them and the reader to see the world in a new way.

Having assembled a smart, compelling ensemble, reminiscent of HBO's Six Feet Under, Abbott allows us to see the possibility of happiness even as the city itself is tested. With humor and profound empathy, she has crafted a novel that runs deep into the heart of our need for commitment from friends, lovers, and family.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Renowned memoirist Abbott debuts as a novelist with a shrewd, polished comedy of manners. Beginning in Manhattan shortly before 9/11 and ending a year later, this witty yet weighty tale is told in eight distinct voices. Antonia, a canny, elegant widow, is trying to help her daughter, 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 Catskills estate, is in love with Antonia, while his granddaughter is in love with Greg’s niece, and the two women plan a spectacular weddinglike commitment ceremony at Sam’s 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. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1St Edition edition (March 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125673
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125674
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,474,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Smart, compelling, believable characters, April 4, 2008

By 

P. Grant - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Future of Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

Love's the theme, but Anxiety the subtext in this smart and beautifully written novel. Abbott has a way of getting you right inside her characters from the moment you meet them, and cleverly leads you from one to the other, layering the connections among them. The setting is Manhattan, 2001, specifically and concretely so, but urbanites everywhere will recognize the characters' dilemmas and domestic disturbances, the choices and possibilities that engulf them even before the disasters of 9-ll. A stunning portrait of the ways modern (and uniquely privileged humans) cling to the illusion of control in a chaotic universe.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Incisive, The Deadliest Novel, November 19, 2009

By 

John Thorndike "Author: The Last of His Mind:... (Athens, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Future of Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

Each chapter of Abbott's book jumps us from one character's point of view to another's. In some plot-driven novels this can drive me crazy. In this character-rich novel I loved it. No matter who was at the center of the next chapter, I was glad to be with them. I read with fascination, I went wherever the author led me. Abbott plunges us into the chaos of love, of everything that passes for love, of family strife, long-dead marriages, unexpected passion, death and destruction and second chances.

At one point I thought, "The book is like a round of golf." No matter that the characters, with all their foibles, have hooked a drive on the last hole, overshot the green and putted crazily to a five-over-par. With each chapter all hope is refreshed, all chances renewed as they tee up for their next shot. Abbott's range of characters is tremendous: men and women, old and young, white and black, the very microcosm of a somewhat-monied New York. All of them have stumbled. Some are pitiful at times, some clueless, some angry or desperate. They have a fragile grip on confidence and desire, and I would follow them anywhere.

In a chapter from Sam's point of view, we see where his marriage has landed: "Ah, yes. You marry. Then it's children, schools, mortgages, taxes, hard work, and you feel you've got a successful marriage on days when you're speaking to each other. No time or energy to ask why you haven't had sex with your wife for a year, and then five years and then ten. You are a pair...and you hardly know what love is. You hardly know who she is. But you cannot leave her, because that would be dishonorable..."

The dilemmas in this novel often seem irresolvable. And to Abbott's credit, they are not always smoothly resolved. As we hear later about Sam and his lover, Antonia, "You get what you want and don't know what to do with it."

This is the most readable, the most charming, the most incisive, the deadliest novel I have read in years.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book to Live In, July 18, 2008

By 

Mal Schoen (Northern California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Future of Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

When I enjoy a book I call it a "book to live in" - it becomes at least as (usually more) interesting than Real Life. For me, this was one such book.
The narrative was engaging, the characters interesting, there were side issues that entertained and enlightened - and surprises. In short, it has all the elements of a successful novel. I look forward to future novels from this writer.