What can I say about marriage? One of the great puzzles and mysteries about marriage is why so many fail and what, if anything, could or should have been done to prevent their collapse. Almost everyone I know in the world has been divorced, divorce has been around me my whole life. My parents ought to have gotten divorced, and I did get divorced after 35 years of marriage. When a therapist told me I was not married for all practical purposes, I was stunned. I called it the Chrystal Cathedral moment – thousands of pieces of glass shattered all around me. Not once in all of those 35 years did I ever think I would get divorced. Not until the day it happened. And then I thought I would never survive it.
To this day, I have no idea if the divorce could have been prevented, or by what means.
So why do marriages fail? Can they be saved? Ben Schrank takes up this subject with a surprisingly gentle and rueful novel – “Love Is A Canoe” published by (Sarah Chrichton Books/FSG). Writer Peter Herman is something of a folk hero, although the how-to-marriage manual full that catapulted him to fame was a couple of decades back and since that success he hasn’t written a word, hanging out in his small upstate town with his wife Lisa, trying unsucessfully to run a country inn. And to hide from his publisher. Peter seems to know he wasn’t much of a writer and his book was something of a fraud, filled with dumb bromides (“Most likely, true love is nearby.”) “Love In A Canoe” was inspired by his ponderous grandparents and their allegedly wonderful marriage. His grandfather saw marriage as a canoe with two paddlers. His advice for men who strayed: “stay in the canoe.” Peter acknowledges he made up most of their sappy quotes anyway.
Stella, an ambitious editor in New York (of course) conjures up a save-the-marriage contest to revive Peter and his book sales after she has been assigned to pore though the publishing house’s backlist and look for old books that might be revived. Her boss makes it clear that if she fails in her mission, her head will roll. Peter reluctantly agrees to counsel a couple whose marriage is in trouble. They’ll come up to see him and he will advise them on how to keep their troubled marriage going over a quiet lakeside dinner. Everyone expects Peter to save them.
Peter’s life is unexpectedly and sadly opening up as the story begins. His wife Lisa has just died and Peter finds himself with Maddie, someone he knows he doesn’t love but doesn’t have the heart to reject. Maddie wants him to sell his interest in the inn and move with her to San Francisco, and he agrees, mostly because he doesn’t know what else to do.
The young couple who win the contest – many applied – come to see him. Emily is a shy marketing executive who has loved Peter’s book her whole life and her husband Eli is a handsome and too-charismatic entrepeneur. There are all kinds of publishing politics and intrigue swirling around the contest and Schrank – himself a high-ranking editor at Penguin Books – has a lot of fun with the hyper-charged, ambitious and neurotic people who buy, sell and edit the books we read. Schrank nails the fraught atmosphere of contemporary publishing. Stella is an ambitious young editor trying to make a big score while her colleagues are all sharpening their knives and hoping she fails. To enliven things further, it turns out that Peter had a long ago affair with Stella’s boss, who also edited his book. Stella has no idea.
“Love Is A Canoe” reminds us that bromides from the canoe – “Honor Your Love And Show That It Is The One True Thing” are twigs in a forest fire when it comes to saving a marriage in trouble. The plan calls for Peter to save the three-year-old marriage and then all three will return to New York for a big media swing touting his simple wisdom, the marriage he saved, and thus a new edition of his book.
It doesn’t turn out that way. Everyone in this warm, funny and surprising novel ends up confronting themselves and the conventional wisdom surrounding their lives. It turns out that the truth prevails, bloody but unbowed. Bromides do not go far in the nightmare realm of the failing marriage. Everybody gets a second chance, whether they want it or not, and Peter, a man who has been hiding from the reality of his life for years, has to suddenly face up to and advise himself. There are no homilies for him.
I liked this book and recommend it. It is unusual and wise, a meditation on the nature of life, love and marriage. Publishing too, and how it is being devoured by the search for the big score. Peter, it turns out, has no better idea than the rest of us how to save a marriage or even manage his own life, but he and almost everyone else in the story discover some other important and very meaningful truths about life.