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Separate Hours
A love story about the betrayal of love
A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long-term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared basement office in an upper Westside New York brownstone. They also share a ten-year-old daughter, a too-comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth? Can either of the novel’s narrators be taken at their word? Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together (and apart), trying to make sense of the darkly irrational. When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne’s marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal. Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles. For all the novel’s comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne’s initial meeting, they embrace the conflict. Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent. Self-knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach’s seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a “patient etherized upon a table.”
A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long-term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared basement office in an upper Westside New York brownstone. They also share a ten-year-old daughter, a too-comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth? Can either of the novel’s narrators be taken at their word? Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together (and apart), trying to make sense of the darkly irrational. When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne’s marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal. Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles. For all the novel’s comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne’s initial meeting, they embrace the conflict. Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent. Self-knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach’s seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a “patient etherized upon a table.”
204 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
2 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Baumbach
40 books17 followersBorn in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. Married Annette Grant (fourth wife) on Dec. 18, 2004. Former wives: Naomi Miller, Elinor Berkman, Georgia Brown. Children: David, Nina, Noah and Nico. A.B (English) Brooklyn College, MFA (Playwriting) Columbia University, Ph.D (English and American Lit), Stanford University. Fellowships include Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Merrill. Invented in 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America; reinvented in 1988 as FC2. An unintentionally well-kept secret among contemporary American novelists. Author of 14 books of fiction
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 12, 2019
Shrink dreams
Compelling, puzzling, seductive, infuriating—I loved this funny, sad elegant book about people I might almost know. Take out the almost?
Compelling, puzzling, seductive, infuriating—I loved this funny, sad elegant book about people I might almost know. Take out the almost?
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December 8, 2023This is the seventh or so novel from Jonathan Baumbach, notable father of Noah Baumbach of A Marriage Story, and even more so as the dad from Noah Baumbach’s film The Squid and the Whale. I only mention these movies as they relate to the context under which Noah Baumbach was raised. The back of this novel notes that Jonathan Baumbach has four children and three ex-wives and there’s the most tepid blurb I might have ever read in a book, something like “This is Jonathan Baumbach’s most accessible novel and should win him a wide readership.” Riveting!
Anyway, this novel is a series of different chapter cataloging and charting the break up of a marriage. Two psychologists, each meeting patients in their shared basement at different times, are experiencing a falling out. We start the whole novel out with a comment that the husband “likes middles” and not the mythos of beginnings and endings. So we’re being treated then to a lot of the middle. This is obviously counter to the two Noah Baumbach movies, which are about endings.
The novel is postmodern (by the back of the book’s own terms) in execution. We get chapters narrated by each doctor, by a third person narrator, as a case study, and even as a side by side set of interviews published in two parallel columns on the same page. It’s an interesting, if very anemic novel.
Anyway, this novel is a series of different chapter cataloging and charting the break up of a marriage. Two psychologists, each meeting patients in their shared basement at different times, are experiencing a falling out. We start the whole novel out with a comment that the husband “likes middles” and not the mythos of beginnings and endings. So we’re being treated then to a lot of the middle. This is obviously counter to the two Noah Baumbach movies, which are about endings.
The novel is postmodern (by the back of the book’s own terms) in execution. We get chapters narrated by each doctor, by a third person narrator, as a case study, and even as a side by side set of interviews published in two parallel columns on the same page. It’s an interesting, if very anemic novel.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews