Semi-Detached

Sarah Robertson is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Seeking relief from a marriage gone stale, Barbara and Elliot, the
retired couple at the heart of Cynthia Holz’s third novel, agree to go
their semi-separate ways by dividing their home into two apartments.
Their bid for semi-independence bemuses and threatens family and
friends. Their daughter, a case study in arrested development,
aggressively campaigns for a happy reunion, while their more passive son
broods about his own faltering marriage, “an uninspired union of the
weary and overworked.”

Adjusting to single life is another challenge facing our semi-detached
couple. Having firmly rejected the role of “recently retired teacher
and discontented housewife,” Barbara discovers “the intoxication of
solitude” but also the travails of home maintenance and the limited
sexual opportunities for “an aging woman.” She hankers after a
younger man but ends up attracting the attentions of a bald
microbiologist, “stooped and sixtyish.” Elliot, the reluctant party
in the breakup, finds romance with an emotionally needy earth mother,
but it is his estranged wife he really wants. Barbara and Elliot’s
most formidable challenge is the new relationship they must negotiate
with each other.

Sexual jealousy and unrequited love are persistent themes. Holz’s
couples are at emotional cross-purposes—the more one partner needs,
the more the other withholds. The author elicits the emotional truth of
her discontented (but mostly sympathetic) characters through unadorned
prose, sharp observations, and a satisfying blend of humor and
poignancy. She expresses her themes in wonderfully concrete ways.
Barbara’s confrontation with “a mouse stuck to a glue trap and
struggling to break free” is among the novel’s many small miracles.
The scene (by turns hilarious and appalling) embodies not only
Barbara’s post-separation anxieties but also the yearning for escape
that inspired the separation in the first place.

Holz gives such a persuasive account of the forces that eroded Barbara
and Elliot’s marriage that their final (semi-)rapprochement seems
somewhat contrived. Thankfully, the journey to it is anything but.