Asking for Love

by Roxana Robinson

Short stories set in the old-guard WASP enclaves of Manhattan, Connecticut, Long Island and Maine and in the UK, peopled with women and men whose loves are in various stages of repair or disarray, and with their children and teenagers struggling to find rules and identities in their lives

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Roxana Robinson is the author of eight works of fiction, including the novels Cost and Sparta. She is also the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she edited The New York Stories of Edith Wharton and wrote the introduction to Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, both published by NYRB Classics. Robinson is currently the president of the Authors Guild.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I added this book to my wishlist after reading the collection A World of Difference: An Anthology of Short Stories from Five Continents which features Robinson's story 'Mr Sumasono', about an Indonesian diplomat visiting a divorcee and her two daughters in New Jersey. This story seemed almost perfect to me; balanced, clever, thought-provoking and full of unfathomed depths. Now I wonder if it isn't too cosy, though it still stands out for its elegant structure, in a collection I enjoyed most for its rich ambiguities.

Most of the stories involve divorced people or married people having affairs, while children and adolescents are folded uncomfortably into the shifting patterns of parents' lives. Emotions, motivations, actions as offerings, are often sensitively observed or surprising in their aptness, as in 'Leaving Home' when a thirteen year old girl can't bear to play with a younger cousin and impulsively escapes her, or in 'The Nightmare' when a woman who has come to spend an intimate evening at her divorced partner's house for the first time longs to extend parental comfort to his eight year old daughter, from whom she is hiding and who is pleading to sleep in her father's room as she's scared.

This (always heterosexual) world of illicit and broken relationships is, Robinson suggests, ill at ease among the Anglophone privileged middle class milieu these stories centre on. The tales are full of babysitters, housekeepers, blue-eyed professionals, country retreats, clubs, cars. In 'Slipping Away' the narrator, who is cheating on her husband, feels that the Spanish language, which she speaks fluently and uses with her housekeeper (who is always complaining to her of boyfriend trouble), is a world of emotion that doesn't exist in English. Her husband's coldness (he buys one pear, and doesn't share it) seems to confirm this view, and when both she and her husband are behaving exactly as characters in one of Lita's dramatic, passionate anecdotes, she interprets this as 'slipping into Spanish', becoming her idea of the racial other, rather than deconstructing that essentialising of difference.

I always appreciate books that give teenagers some space, and Robinson makes use of this transitional era of vulnerability to explore more ambivalent territories. I liked the sad anecdote told by Nicko in 'The Reign of Arlette' of his visit to his little half-sister's birthday party, where he was unjustly treated, because it shows qualities not expected in teenage boys: open, enthusiastic affection for a much younger relative, the ability to look after a baby, thoughtfulness, desire to please adults, and also how he is punished for these things. In contrast, a mother in 'King of the Sky' reflects that 'in third grade, boys' fantasies are almost entirely violent. Mayhem and death lie at their cores, and all require the powerful and satisfying sound of an explosion'. This observation connects loosely I think with the conversation she has later with her friend Margaret while their two boys are playing together, about the horror that they feel imagining the boys' fathers (both women are separated) looking after them. Margaret's belief in male parenting incompetence seems more rigid than the narrator's, and it annoys her son, who contends that he would like to live with his dad. Subtle feminist points often arise in the stories, which are mostly woman-centred. 'The Nile in Flood', about frustrated female desire, might be an homage to Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories

Some stories try to address racial difference and racism. In 'Mr Sumasono' and 'The Nile in Flood', a racially marked character, bodily exotic and beautiful, culturally other, is brought close by desire or yearning, and suddenly assumes subjecthood, returning, subverting, deconstructing the white gaze. The same exotification of racial difference and reversal of subject-power occurs in the more explicitly race focussed 'White Boys in their Teens', but here the narrator has to literally get down on the floor to 'enter the world' of his black friends, glimpsing something beyond the glamour and ease of its polished surface. White characters in these stories hesitate in haloes of unease – objectifying exotification is problematised, but in the end they are forgiven or absolved by the grace of the racially othered characters, and all is well, white comfort it restored, except in the case of 'The Nile in Flood'. In another story, a woman chatting with a racist at dinner ends up asking him to forgive her for being abrasive towards him because he reminds her of her father. Unpleasant opinions aren't the whole of a person, she thinks. True enough, but I didn't like that ending, and another racist is narratively forgiven in 'The Favour', but her words stimulate the protagonist to critically examine his own attitudes, which doesn't happen to the liberal in the other story who remains comfortable with her own ideology towards race. The rest of 'Breaking the Rules' is about game hunting, which the narrator ethically dislikes, but feels she can't complain about, because she isn't a vegetarian. Unlike her father, she makes 'accommodation', is accepting, spreads comfort. Instead of breaking feelings, she breaks rules, which are often pivots in these stories. Yet as the teenage white boy finds on the floor of the car, change comes when more than just rules are broken.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Asking for love is the saddest thing in the world, and if you have to ask, the answer is too painful to hear."

When love crumbles, everything you collected about each other is tainted, unwanted even. "We had been in different countries all along, speaking to each other in different languages." When love ends there are casualties, and if children are involved there are complicated knots when you start fresh. Children are learning the new dynamics, mothers and fathers are having to depend on strangers to help raise and watch their children. Sometimes in these strangers the door to danger is opened, and you didn't see it coming. In building new lives and grabbing for love, children are forced into a dance they don't know the steps to, of figuring out what is accepted and what isn't. Pushed into a sort of play-acting, until they learn the rules of this start up family, of not knowing what to say or how to behave, these children are untethered and confused.
Loneliness leaves a person famished for love, anywhere they can get it, be it loveless relationships that give comfort or those with strings. You half hate yourself for needing someone to cling on to, after shedding years of marriage and knowing now you are just strangers who resent everything you gave and told of yourself.
The ex is often like a phantom, left behind in decorations, children's faces, rituals and habits. Meeting someone who has just divorced, others are drawn into ridiculous games of subterfuge, because they don't want their ex to know and talk about you to their friends. Welcome to the adult world of second chances, where love isn't just about two people.
Affairs, divorces, marriages of convenience.. this isn't the sort of love you dream about when you're young and idealistic. In the story 'Slipping Away' there is a little of us in each character. The dissatisfied wife who is having an affair, hungry for excitement and passion and the husband James with his strange behavior, at one point most people have been the weak one, stooping to spy so as not to be party to betrayal, as if you could stop it all.
This is a collection of grown up love stories, for those who navigate complicated situations.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Asking for Love is a collection of short stories by Roxana Robinson. Each story is a vignette of a family, a marriage, or the children who have survived. These are upper class, white families living in affluence, in New York City, Maine, Connecticut as well as England and an unnamed Caribbean country. The stories are full of ambiguity, of unspoken longings and broken connections. In the title story, the mother of a daughter who has rejected her in the wake of the parents’ divorce says, “You know so much about your husband….Jointly you own this secret, intimate, trivial knowledge. It’s comforting, this charting of the particularities of your own existence on someone else’s map.” In exchange, a person gets the opportunity to start over but this seems a big loss from which most of the characters, including the children, never seem to recover.
Even those marriages that survive, such as The Favor, Slipping Away, and The Nile in Flood, seem to consist of broken connections and unmet yearnings. The marriages seem to have disintegrated, and sometimes begun, in calculation. These stories are full of material objects which often seem to take the place of love, to serve as a marker for affection (“She was performing our ritual with our familiar things-old silver, worn linen, and faded china. She was setting forth our symbols in a calligraphy that she knew well, a pattern that stood in our household for festivity and love, and she was honoring this,” again from the title story). But even more than these objects, people are exchanging themselves for the security of a relationship that presents an illusion of security and connection.
The stories are beautifully crafted with lovely prose. They are filled with moments of recognition in which the characters suddenly see themselves (and their lives) revealed in unpleasant ways. The children in these stories are lost, looking for their place in fractured families. Even the intact family of the first story, Leaving Home, shows 13-year-old Alison escaping her suffocatingly virtuous family whose love seems highly conditional on “correct” feelings, looking for more comfortable connections with her peers.
The story “Do Not Stand Here” has an extended conversation on ambiguity. In discussing a play by Harold Pinter, the husband, Richard, says he likes ambiguity. When his wife disagrees, he says, “In plays, at least. I suppose not so much in real life. Their friend, the hollowness of whose marriage is revealed in this story and highlighted by his undisciplined son, replies that in life, “ambiguity is rampant.” And Richard’s wife, Emily adds, “and where everyone furnishes their own subtext. Where we interpret things however we want to.” Richard: “And where we change our interpretations continually and drastically.”
Asking for Love is filled with silences which the reader fills in the subtext. However, at least some of the interpretations seem consistent. At least amongst a certain class of people, it is extremely hard to form and maintain connections, be they between spouses or parents and their children. The stories are so rich in beauty that they mask the emptiness and despair they portray.
I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher Open Road Integrated Media, for the opportunity to read this beautiful, sad collection (in exchange for an honest review).

[Anne Caverhill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love this authors writing. Still stung by how her words make you feel every nuance of her stories. Roxana Robinson is brilliant. Period.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robinson writes of love in the lives of upper class, east coast, WASPs. In these stories she writes of marriage, divorce, remarriage, and how the children are affected. Her prose is lucid and unornamented; the stories are told with no unnecessary words. Not being of the group of people she writes about, I can’t say if she depicts them perfectly or not, but they seem realistic and lifelike- love, after all, probably works the same no matter what social class you are, even if your other concerns are different. For some reason I, who am not the biggest fan of short stories, really liked these. Just something about how Robinson writes. Not “my favorite book of all time”, but I enjoyed them a great deal.

[Kara Hansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I enjoyed the short story format, and overall the stories were fairly neat and tidy. Nothing too exciting or shocking~ and I think in many of the stories the reader could see themselves in one character or another. It was good, not great, but for anyone looking for a quick read, I would recommend.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roxana Robinson is SO good! I'm reading everything I can get my hands on, and this is my favorite collection of short stories (so far).

The big question: Why isn't this amazing fiction writer more well-known? Or is she well-known & loved and I've just been in the dark?

[Arja Salafranca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There are no rules, once you’re divorced. The patterns are disrupted. You’ve had your moment, in the white dress, the veil, when everything was orderly, and understood: there was the bride’s side, the groom’s. After a divorce, everything is askew, uncharted. Now there are times when you stand behind a closed door, holding your breath so the baby-sitter will not hear you.” – From Roxana Robinson’s story, ‘The Nightmare’
First published in 1996, these stories are now released in digital format, Roxana Robinson’s Asking for Love portrays a world of “asking for love”, mostly in a time after divorce, with many of the characters leaving the innocence of young adulthood, and either hitting middle-age or already deep within its margins. And this means that there are children to be considered: children who find themselves with step-parents and new siblings, navigating a strange new world where, as in the story ‘Family Restaurant’, five-year-old Vanessa sits, “Vanessa looked from face to face around the table, trying to learn these new rules.”
This is a world where divorce leaves families disrupted, torn apart, where histories between husband and wife must be left, for new loves, and second chances, with men in their forties or older, with their own children, their own histories and mistakes, a world where time and again the past must be renegotiated as in the title story, ‘Asking for Love’: “Memory is kaleidoscopic: the slightest shift creates another picture, detailed, complete, convincing.”
This is also a world of broken hearts, of regret, or rebuilding, a world whose characters know intimately the meaning of these words from the story, The Reign of Arlette’:“For gentleness is what you hear in a lover’s voice when he tells you he is leaving, gentleness is what you are offered when there is nothing else left.”
It is not an easy world, and the transitions are not always successfully negotiated. In the above quoted ‘The Nightmare’ Lewis and the unnamed narrator are going home to his house, for the first time. His young daughter will be asleep, Lewis assures her and he’s planned it all, she can stay the night as long as the narrator leaves by seven thirty the next morning. It seems a modest sacrifice to spend the night with her lover. But his daughter wakes as they return, fearful of monsters in her room and the narrator stays hidden in the bedroom, the night’s plans disrupted. She wants to comfort the small daughter, but she is not here as a mother, but a lover, and an unknown one at that. There are no rules for these situations. The stepchildren situation is addressed too in ‘The Reign of Arlette’ where the new husband hasn’t, can’t develop a relationship with the stepson, even though the marriage is several years old now.
Several of the stories are written from the point of view of children and teenagers, such as the 13-year-old narrator in Leaving Home, recalling farm holidays from the 1970s, or Bess in ‘Sleepover’, seven years old and her mother away for one night of each week. Robinson has a particular talent for getting under the skin of children and teenagers.
Highlights of the collection include ‘Slipping Away’ written with intense, thriller-like narration. James, the narrator’s husband, a trust-fund baby sometimes goes to work, sometimes doesn’t. As the narrator is seeing another man, and they have plans for lunch, the story turns into a cat and mouse affair. She knows James is listening in on her calls, is going in and out of the apartment to confuse her as to his whereabouts. This is a time before cellphones or emails – and she must somehow tell Guy to meet her not at the apartment but outside. This brilliant story is one of high tragedy and comedy as the hours tick on, and James and she carry on playing their games.
In ‘The Nile in Flood’ we are with Nora, forty-nine years old with her new sixtyish husband on honeymoon on the Nile. But this is not a marriage entered into with love, but cold, calculating desperation and the force of that realisation comes down heavily on Nora one hot, claustrophobic night when she seeks refuge from the Egyptian heat on the deck of the cruiser they are holidaying on.
In ‘Breaking the rules’ set in a Scottish hunting lodge, Anna, who moves back and forth in memory between the day a year ago when she lost her father, from whom she hadn’t spoken for a year, to the present, with her husband on a hunting trip in the chilly Scottish country. A quiet, delicate story that pulses meaning of regret and realisation. As in so many of the stories, the past and memory move against the present.
This collection presents a world of adults beginning anew – a tender world, but also an infinitely interesting one, names and stories shift, ages change, but Robinson’s gaze is tender, gentle, and quite, quite compelling.

[Sascha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a single author’s collection of short stories can sometimes be a gamble if you’re unfamiliar with their work and I initially felt that I had lost the bet with Roxana Robinson’s Asking for Love, re-released this past week (June 21). The first six or so stories seemed to have a common theme of betrayal with typically the protagonist doing the betraying. I find betrayal one act that is extremely unforgivable so I could feel disagreeability building inside of me.Throw in the fact that the characters represent a minority with which I am personally unfamiliar with (the extremely wealthy country club set whose idea of parenting is nannies and boarding school) and I found it a struggle to continue reading.

However, (you knew there was a “however,” didn’t you?) once I started reading the title story, “Asking For Love,” the clichéd tide changed. Read more here: https://saschadarlington.wordpress.co...

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I didnt realize until my request was approved that it was short stories--which I dont particularly like to read. However, I have read a few collections that I thought were fabulous and I do like Roxana Robinson, so...

Perhaps a 3.5. On the whole the language was beautiful. Robinson is an excellent wordsmith. Her descriptions--sometimes just a phrase--often were exceptional in conveying far beyond a couple of words. Consider: "He drank aggrievedly..." [I think she likes to the word use aggrieved--noticed a few times]. And "The mascara had begun its inevitable treachery..."

These stories take place in both the US and UK, usually with single-parent families struggling in their various situations--friction between the various parties and generations. Some stories sucked me in immediately; others not so much.

[Reeca Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a huge short story reader. However, I was asked to give this a shot.

These stories touch on all kinds of love, Mothers’ love, Fathers’ love, the love between siblings, second chance love, just to name a few. The characters are rich and rewarding. The settings add so much to these tender stories.

The author exposes many family issues. With wonderful insight and strength, she takes the reader through many trials which uncover the different levels of astounding love.

I am still not a huge fan of short stories. However, these enlighten you and just make you feel warm and fuzzy.

I received this book from Netgalley for a honest review

[Fredsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are good stories, and pack a lot of punch. Ms. Robinson's interests continue to be in domestic tragicomedy, and it's a relief to read such a wide array of characters with their problems instead of a novel with the same characters chewing it all over and over and over. There are some wonderful moments here. 3.65!

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this becauswe I liked another book by the author and they had this one too at the library. Short stories. Very readable. Many of the shorts made me wish she'd continue them into novels. But I'm just not a great big fan of the short story collection genre. Guess because I end up feeling like that much of the time, wanting more from the characters and the story.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gentle and beautifully written collection of short stories about love, marriage, family and divorce. Robinson’s characters are full of longing and inarticulacy, always striving for something better and more meaningful in their relationships and never quite finding it. I enjoyed all the stories and found each small world evocatively, empathetically and convincingly depicted.

[Lydia Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read short stories very often and I loved how these quickly sucked you in. For such a quick read I'm surprised how poignant and moving some of them are. Some really got to me and are sticking with me.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent short stories!

[Beth Dalrymple · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roxana writes from the perspective of the upper middle class and her stories reveal the joys and sorrows of marriage and the universal challenges of parenthood. Each story is a little jewel.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The very short stories are all sad and depressing. Especially the ones featuring children. One or two might be thought provoking but an entire collection is too much.

[Laura]

From Free Library. Pretty good book of short stories. I don't really like short stories since you barely get to know the characters and the story is over.