The Liability of Love

Starred review from March 15, 2021
A novel that explores how societal expectations can make people hide their true selves. In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1979, Margaret Carlyle graduates from high school and begins college with dreams of finding a great romance at Trinity College. However, in the spring of her freshman year, her fellow student, Anders Salisbury, rapes her during their first date. Her close friend Fitz, who's secretly in love with her, urges her to report the crime, but she refuses; she wants to simply ignore it and put it behind her. Years later, however, Anders becomes a famous movie star. The trauma of the incident causes Margaret to hide her true feelings from those closest to her, including Douglas, a thoroughly average high school teacher whom she eventually marries. Fitz is wealthy, privileged, and popular but also full of self-loathing, due to anxiety over his weight. His father expects him to follow him into the insurance business. However, he sympathizes too much with insurance claimants and feels "completely unsuited for the role he had been groomed from birth to play." His secretary, Brenda, develops an intense crush on him, but she has her own secret. Schoenberger shows a great deal of sympathy and affection for her good-hearted and flawed major characters, and she relates their stories in matter-of-fact prose studded with pithy observational gems: A secretary "functions as a human alarm clock"; a socialite's expensive spa treatments are "hush money she slipped to gravity and time." The novel effectively examines love in all its forms--friendship, romance, unrequited longing, marriage, self-love, the love between parents and children--and what happens when people don't believe themselves worthy of others' love. In the end, the various players can only get what they deserve by speaking their own truths. A keenly observed, compassionate, and absorbing work.

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