Spring and Fall - Hardcover

NICHOLAS DELBANCO lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Nicholas Delbanco's new novel, Spring and Fall, builds on a premise that could double as an exercise in the MFA writing program he directs at the University of Michigan: Throw two former lovers together on a cruise ship after the passage of 40 years and craft a story that does not somehow evoke "The Love Boat." It's not easy, but Delbanco rises to the challenge in this spare, elegant novel. Along the way, he reminds us that, in the right hands, there is always something new to be said about the experience of love.

His protagonists, Hermia and Lawrence, first meet in 1962 as students at Radcliffe and Harvard. Their passionate and intense affair is played out against a backdrop of what now seem quaint references to parietal hours in dorms and LSD-peddling professors such as Timothy Leary. The relationship ends with a spate of mutually destructive behavior that conveniently helps avoid the larger question of whether they have a future together at an age when neither feels ready to commit.

Fast forward to the present, with both characters now in their 60s, a string of failed marriages and four adult children between them. They bump into one another while touring an ancient brothel in Pompeii.

Delbanco has written 23 books, including 16 previous works of fiction. He skillfully avoids weighting the narrative with too much backstory, and the success of this novel arguably lies in the choices he knows to make by way of omission. He provides only the stark highlights of the characters' intervening years, leaving the reader with a series of jarring images that ultimately prove more illuminating than pages and pages of exposition. Hermia's failed marriage is captured in brief but memorable detail as her journalist husband descends into a state of delusional paranoia: "If she said hello to the doorman he ordered her to stop it; when she talked with other mothers in the playground about clothes or weather or how their children were maturing, he warned her -- for Paul would accompany them always, standing by the slide or swing, sitting cross-legged on the next bench down."

Hermia's falling-out with her daughter is also reduced to a simple squabble about mud on shoes that leads to a long-term estrangement in a scene reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (also, coincidentally, a story about love that spans decades) in which a marriage of more than 50 years nearly implodes over a fight about a bar of soap.

Equally striking are the details the author chooses to include, such as occasional snippets of sexual imagery or anecdotes that make Lawrence unattractive in his self-absorption. When they first meet as students, Hermia observes that Lawrence is a bit full of himself as he drones on about the aesthetics of various professors at different schools of architecture: "He was trying to impress her, and though she was unimpressed she liked how hard he tried." We empathize with Lawrence, warming to him as age and infirmity soften his rough edges and force him to come to terms with his own limitations. "Early on he'd hoped to change the shape of things, to be a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright or Buckminster Fuller of his own generation; now here he was producing drawings for a downtown four-story parking garage."

There is also something surprisingly sweet in Delbanco's physical descriptions of age: When Hermia first sees Lawrence as a student, "his eyes were blue, his mouth was full-lipped, mobile, and his cheekbones were pronounced." Now, at 64, Lawrence has hair sprouting from his ears. Hermia "studied the liver spots and network of veins and his wrinkled knuckles, the fingernails trimmed roughly and the cuticles he bit."

It is perhaps worth noting that these are characters of a certain ilk: Hermia is the daughter of a famous painter, accustomed to a certain way of life. She occupies the ship-owner's lavish cabin on her voyage, for example, and at her home on Cape Cod, her erudite dinner guests sip brandy and self-consciously discuss art and politics. Meanwhile, Lawrence is an architect and professor in Ann Arbor, Mich., admittedly out of touch with red-state America and alienated from some of his less intellectual fellow travelers. An unlikely twist at the end of the novel can be explained only by supposing that the world in which these characters exist is so insular that they can't help bumping into one another.

Is there really such a thing as one true love, and how might life have turned out but for the romantic road not taken? Delbanco's wise and poignant take on these matters of the heart is sure to have broad resonance, even if the result is no mass-market love story, no rum-soaked Carnival Cruise.

Reviewed by Susan Coll
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