Love in the Ruins (Where Else?)

In Shirley Abbott's delightful The Future of Love (Algonquin, 308 pp., $23.95), eight sophisticated New Yorkers fall in and out of romantic and domestic entanglements in the months just before and just after 9/11. First comes Mark, a laid-off banker sorely afflicted with yuppie anomie, who can't help cheating on Maggie, his devoted, unappealing wife, with their daughter's nursery school teacher. Meanwhile, Maggie's mother Antonia—a widowed, wealthy, old-school bohemian—is having a passionate affair with Sam, whose long marriage to Edith has grown predictably stale. Edith, for her part, can't quite fathom her darling granddaughter Alison, who's intent on staging a fancy commitment ceremony with her lover Candace—who just happens to be black—at Sam and Edith's elegant country house. Rounding out the cast are Gregory and Arty, whose long, successful relationship is suddenly menaced not by infidelity, insecurity or time, but by a fatal illness that jaded readers might expect to rally the characters and bind them together, as illnesses in charming comedies of manners often do.Abbot, a fine, meticulous writer, is so skilled at character description that she could probably get away with focusing on her novel's people while phoning in its plot. And when the twin towers collapse (because they always must), the novel's denouement feels perilously predestined. Disaster, after all, is a predictable literary trope. Time and again, bookish cataclysms drive their characters either to seize, boldly, a brave new existence, or to return, gratefully and with renewed purpose, to the life they took for granted.

To Abbott's immense credit, nothing so pat or simplistic occurs here. In the wake of disaster, some of her characters do behave melodramatically—Mark, for instance, attempts a wild escape, and Sam tries to do the right thing by returning to Edith and giving up Antonia. Yet Mark ends up looking ridiculous, while Sam's noble gesture leads only to unhappiness. Abbott's characters live and love as the rest of us do, with consciences and egos that aren't salved by easy fixes or clichéd notions of right and wrong. "She did not need sleep, she felt buoyant," Antonia thinks in the final chapter, even though she and her beloved have come to radically different conclusions concerning the future of their particular love. "They were as close as two people could be."