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Separate Hours
An honest and elegant (if not slightly disturbing) imagining of the way truth becomes elusive in long-term relationships. Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love.
204 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1990
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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