Deep into the book, Leaving feels like a Westchester remix of Chekhov’s 'The Lady With the Dog,' another story of adultery with a confrontation at the theater. Robinson’s storytelling is classic, page after page of swiftly moving scenes and writing as precise as rows of tilled earth. Robinson reworks the short sentence musically, repeating and returning until words yield their meaning ... At times, the characters’ restraint felt to me like that of another era. But I relaxed into Robinson’s masterly cadences and insights. After reading Leaving, and her 2008 novel of addiction, Cost, I’d read any story she has to tell ... The ending is a bombshell, eminently discussable. This lithe novel engrosses. Robinson proves that writers can still evoke the silences and renunciations that thwart desire, and that stars still cross.
Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, Leaving, cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet ... even if their wealth feels at times off-putting, Robinson’s writing — unfailingly clear-eyed, packed with psychological insights — compels readers to care passionately about them. Because of that, the novel’s pressure steadily bears down; Robinson has sown in just enough occlusion and uncertainty that its final impact shatters — and the aftershocks abide. Leaving stands as a wondrous feat, at once a cautionary tale, cutaway reveal and pageant. I can’t forget it.
With searing perception and genuine empathy, Robinson captures the fraught nuances of complicated family dynamics, treating the spurned-lover trope with gentleness and compassion.
Robinson writes skillfully and sensitively about Sarah’s feeling for her children and grandchildren, and about her daughter’s agony and terror of childbirth, but Warren, infuriatingly weak and curiously inarticulate in the face of Kat’s haranguing, seems no more than a vehicle for Robinson’s story. This bleak outing offers glimmers of the author’s past greatness but doesn’t reach the same heights.
Every character and relationship in the two families is beautifully drawn, in sentences that manage to be both spare and rich at once. Also in play is the power of art to give our lives shape and meaning: Tosca, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, and the paintings of the Bloomsbury Group add texture to the story. As the novel builds toward its operatic conclusion, Robinson’s profound, complex depiction of family relationships and responsibilities and the difficult choices they entail will resonate with readers in every phase of their own lives. Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth. A triumph.
