A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long-term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared basement office in an upper Westside New York brownstone. They also share a ten-year-old daughter, a too-comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth? Can either of the novel's narrators be taken at their word? Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together (and apart), trying to make sense of the darkly irrational. When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne's marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal. Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles. For all the novel's comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne's initial meeting, they embrace the conflict. Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent. Self-knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach's seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a "patient etherized upon a table."
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Baumbach employs a variety of narrative voices in his well-crafted new novel, but none of them, he makes it clear, are to be trusted. Obtusely analytical Manhattan psychotherapists Yuri and Adrienne Tipton take turns describing the tortured, slow-motion disintegration of their "relentlessly painful relationship." Baumbach perfectly captures the bland analysts' language that disguises scathing verbal abuse as simple observation. Yuri and Adrienne relate the professional competitiveness and personal cruelties that destroy their affection, though their mutual obsession remains. Each has an affair with a patient. The suspicious Yuri pesters Adrienne in an attempt to learn "what's going on"; Adrienne reads Yuri's journal. A chapter titled "The Movie of Their Lives" offers a purportedly objective account, but it, too, is unreliable. Communication breaks down entirely when they visit a family therapist ("Neither blah, nor blah, nor even--I say this with difficulty--blah" Adrienne hears Yuri say), the last step before divorce and the ideal postmortem--an analytical case study. Baumbach is the author of The Life and Times of Major Fiction .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"This is Jonathan Baumbach's most accessible novel and should win him a large readership." -- Bharati Mukherjee
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tour de force of narrative perspective,
By A Customer
This review is from: Separate Hours (Hardcover)
This story of the breakup of the marriage of twopsychotherapists is told alternately from the husband's and the wife's perspective, with glimpses also of their daughter's experiencing of events and a distanced interpretation of how the same events might be interpreted in a screenplay. In the end, although one learns much about what the characters think and remember, one doesn't really know in full what actually happened. Not unlike real life.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
