The Flowerings of Love Are Not for the Weak
By Janet Maslin ,
New York Times, Published: January 11, 2010

WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT
By Amy Bloom 201 pages.
Random House. $25

Photo of author by Beth Kelly

“At 2 o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame,” Amy Bloom writes at the start of her beautifully astute new book. Her narrator is Clare, a middle-aged academic speaking in the present tense.

Clare and her best friend on the faculty, an Englishman named William, are sitting together watching disaster coverage on CNN, the light of the television glinting off their wedding rings as they unexpectedly embrace.

It happens that each of them is married to another person, that the spouses are present, and that the spouses are asleep at 2 a.m., when Clare and William’s union begins. “It does not seem possible,” Clare observes of her new lover, “that we are people with three children, two marriages and a hundred and ten years between us.”

Oh, but it does. Ms. Bloom, who has worked as a psychotherapist as well as a creative writing professor, clearly has great gifts in both those realms. Her 2008 novel, “Away,” was a marvel of concise eloquence and insight, full of artfully executed twists and turns. She writes about characters who are stunning in their verisimilitude but never really predictable in their behavior, and Clare and William quickly emerge as two such figures. Ms. Bloom follows them in sharply cliché-free ways from first embrace deep into guilty pleasure.

This story, “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages,” first appeared in Ploughshares in 2002. Then Ms. Bloom wrote further installments about the fallout from this life-changing affair: “I Love to See You Coming, I Hate to See You Go,” published in Tin House in 2004 (with Clare and William meeting furtively midway between their respective homes, deeply entangled yet still imagining that their marriages will not be affected) and “The Old Impossible,” published in Ploughshares in 2006 (with Clare and William still betraying their spouses and not remotely fooling Clare’s sharp-eyed Uncle David). The final installment, “Compassion and Mercy,” turned up in Granta last summer.

Ms. Bloom’s new book also includes another quartet of tales about a different, even more scandalizing twosome named Lionel and Julia. Given the range of both narratives, this work of extravagantly fine fiction cannot really be called a short-story collection. It’s more of a reunion, or a set of successfully completed jigsaw puzzles. Each of the two quartets has been pieced together into a time-traveling novella filled with hindsight and passion and ever-evolving emotions.

This book also includes four free-standing stories that have nothing to do with one another. But even if its format were more commonplace, “Where the God of Love Hangs Out” would still be something special.

Ms. Bloom’s characters are uncommonly fully formed, seldom young, some of them well into old age. Yet they sustain the ability to surprise one another — and themselves. Case in point: Julia, a white woman who has just lost her black husband, a very famous and successful jazz musician, when she first appears in this book, in the story “Sleepwalking.” Julia and “Sleepwalking” date back to 1993, when they appeared in Ms. Bloom’s book “Come to Me,” but they are well worth revisiting.
The full review at NYT.