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The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love: A Novel
Molly Hanner's marriage to William is slowly unraveling, and the pulls of entropy this exerts upon them and their three children painfully instruct Molly in the many ways people barely miss loving each other. But divorce is only a catalyst in Molly's life. Amazed at the weight of her family's hurt and at her isolation within it, Molly, painter and student of astronomy, shifts her gaze outward -- to the stars, to the images she paints, to the world around her -- looking for an order that will contain the disarray of her own life.
- GenresFiction
203 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 12, 2023
A book about love and grief and memory and the way they make us distant from ourselves if we aren’t careful. I found the tone of this book really intriguing and formative to the actual content of the writing. Def not a book for everyone but I enjoyed it.
November 27, 2019
Not the best written book, but rarely have I read something that describes losses and the inevitable movement towards loss so beautifully and authentically. 3.5 for the beautiful bits.
October 28, 2010
“I don’t love you anymore,” William tells his wife, Molly in the first sentence. Getting disengaged, fully disengaged, is not really possible. You can’t clean- cut years of your life and years of your love, even when the love no longer moves you. Molly and her children, new friends and extended family, are all affected by the connection that remains as well as by the ragged severance.
That is a familiar enough story to huge numbers of people, but there is more than that. With loss of love comes a kind of death, and with even a tiny renewal of love, life returns proportionately for Molly and her children. When love is missing too long, only death remains, the story seems to say. Scenes of loss are offset with scenes of life, its opposite. Socially orphaned children get a chance at life on a farm; a foal is born; a ruined man is saved, at least for a while. Its love and life versus lovelessness and death, and even a little deprivation of love seems to edge closer to death and no one is an island here.
Yet this is not a gloom piece. It is played out in subplots and crafted structures filled mostly with the most everyday kind of small town life. Urban dwellers may not like this as much as I did. Something else not everyone will like. Goodness pervades this novel. People have their flaws and suffer accordingly (William mainly and then the most sympathetic character Zack). But it’s hard to find ugliness here. Even the children seem well-night perfect in their behavior, which struck me after recently reading Hillary Mantel’s Every Day Is Mother’s Day where the landscape is littered with awful people, including the children.
You might get the feeling you’ve walked into a Norman Rockwell painting of a happy family at Thanksgiving. Very pleasant, but maybe a bit too much for some tastes. Perhaps relatedly, I sometimes felt the book was in the style of a children’s book (as I recall such books from long, long ago). “People didn’t know just what he meant, but as they went home that night, each family thought about Sig’s speech. And for several days they felt inspired as a town, but the curious effect of it died down. . . .” –more of the collective reading of groups or categories of people I noted in reviewing about Slow Moon.
Still, while I had trouble getting fully engaged with the characters in Slow Moon, I didn’t have that problem with this one. I could not get as deeply involved as I wanted to; Cox has maintains here distance, and even when she talks about the feelings of someone’s heart, it is from such a matter of fact distance that I couldn’t get into it the way I might if the point were dramatized or acted out; but involved I was. And I must comment on Cox’s appreciation of the younger boy. This was marvelous. I wanted it to develop into a full blown study.
That is a familiar enough story to huge numbers of people, but there is more than that. With loss of love comes a kind of death, and with even a tiny renewal of love, life returns proportionately for Molly and her children. When love is missing too long, only death remains, the story seems to say. Scenes of loss are offset with scenes of life, its opposite. Socially orphaned children get a chance at life on a farm; a foal is born; a ruined man is saved, at least for a while. Its love and life versus lovelessness and death, and even a little deprivation of love seems to edge closer to death and no one is an island here.
Yet this is not a gloom piece. It is played out in subplots and crafted structures filled mostly with the most everyday kind of small town life. Urban dwellers may not like this as much as I did. Something else not everyone will like. Goodness pervades this novel. People have their flaws and suffer accordingly (William mainly and then the most sympathetic character Zack). But it’s hard to find ugliness here. Even the children seem well-night perfect in their behavior, which struck me after recently reading Hillary Mantel’s Every Day Is Mother’s Day where the landscape is littered with awful people, including the children.
You might get the feeling you’ve walked into a Norman Rockwell painting of a happy family at Thanksgiving. Very pleasant, but maybe a bit too much for some tastes. Perhaps relatedly, I sometimes felt the book was in the style of a children’s book (as I recall such books from long, long ago). “People didn’t know just what he meant, but as they went home that night, each family thought about Sig’s speech. And for several days they felt inspired as a town, but the curious effect of it died down. . . .” –more of the collective reading of groups or categories of people I noted in reviewing about Slow Moon.
Still, while I had trouble getting fully engaged with the characters in Slow Moon, I didn’t have that problem with this one. I could not get as deeply involved as I wanted to; Cox has maintains here distance, and even when she talks about the feelings of someone’s heart, it is from such a matter of fact distance that I couldn’t get into it the way I might if the point were dramatized or acted out; but involved I was. And I must comment on Cox’s appreciation of the younger boy. This was marvelous. I wanted it to develop into a full blown study.
November 24, 2007
I saw this in a $1 book bin this summer in San Francisco and bought it based on title alone. There are some pretty hokey parts/story lines in this book, but it does show the ragged way people fall out of love in a nice way and that is sad and tremendously comforting if you are struggling with love.
November 19, 2010
Elizabeth Cox's prose is so unbelievably believable. Reading this book was dreamlike, but it somehow gave me access to real, untouched places—not just in my mind/heart/soul, but to the inner workings of people I thought I knew best of all.
January 27, 2013
Love the Southern voice and experience within this novel. A sad story which really never culminates in that happy ending...just that life goes on with its bits and shreds of joy wherever it can touch us.
August 18, 2007
I read this a while ago. I think Betsy is a wonderful writer. She's got an amazing voice. She's a great writing teacher, too.
February 27, 2014
Seems to float in time. As their marriage dissolves and tragedy strikes, two people try to figure out if and how the fell apart - and where they go from here.
May 24, 2020
Not as advertised - the couple had already fallen out of love before the start of the book. Far more emphasis on the wife's feelings/reactions than the husband's. More interesting was the response by the children to their parents' estrangement. A "tragedy" seems to act merely as the author's attempt to concoct a reconciliation, but things return to the previous status quo. Dull.
February 27, 2018
I enjoyed the first part of this book, the telling is a family and the shift of love over time. But then it felt like the author didn’t think she had enough characters in the book so she brought several in and the story weakened like overwatered soup.
May 8, 2024
Like many other people, I found this book in the discount section of my bookstore and picked it up based off the title alone, and boy am I glad I did. This book made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me feel.
The beauty of this book is in the writing, the story itself isn't anything spectacular but Elizabeth writes in a way that is so beautifully elegant that I couldn't put this book down. Her ability to describe and capture the complexities of grief and life and love and loss is stunning.
Some have said that the story is false advertising because we pick up the book after they've fallen out of love already, but I disagree, Molly certainly isn't out of love at the start of the book and we get to watch her change and grow through the chapters.
Overall 4.5 stars, I'm glad I read this book, it was delightfully refreshing.
The beauty of this book is in the writing, the story itself isn't anything spectacular but Elizabeth writes in a way that is so beautifully elegant that I couldn't put this book down. Her ability to describe and capture the complexities of grief and life and love and loss is stunning.
Some have said that the story is false advertising because we pick up the book after they've fallen out of love already, but I disagree, Molly certainly isn't out of love at the start of the book and we get to watch her change and grow through the chapters.
Overall 4.5 stars, I'm glad I read this book, it was delightfully refreshing.
February 20, 2016
This book started off good but didn't flow smoothly. Was sometimes difficult to follow and was a bit all over the place, especially towards the end. It was like suddenly things that didn't make sense were hurriedly put together. The thoughts and writing in the beginning felt real. The experience of falling out of love and transitioning were from the heart.
June 21, 2009
OK, I only read the first 40 pages of this bbok and I am giving up. Can't stand it!
May 21, 2013
I was afraid it would be depressing but I really enjoyed this book.
June 24, 2012
Takes a little while to get going, but a very satisfying, thoughtful read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews