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Irish Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski: A romance novel in two parts
Ordinary Love Author : Marie Rutkoski ISBN-13 : 978-0349146881 Publisher : Virago Guideline Price : £16.99 Ordinary Love, Virago and Little Brown's 'lead literary fiction' for 2025, is a novel of two parts. In the strong opening half we're given the separation of Jack and Emily. They've been together for about 10 years, have two children and their dynamic is defined by a significant imbalance in their finances (he earns and she doesn't). Cue fascinating, stomach-curdling depictions of everyday coercion, of love-bombing after rages and, on her part, a willed blindness that's finally faltering. While this account is obviously fictional, the unheimlich experience of self-doubt and doublethink required to endure and finally recognise the methods of a controlling partner is done so well, one isn't surprised to read that Rutkoski has 'drawn on her own experience of going through a divorce at 40 as a mother of two, and then entering a queer relationship'. Initially, the second half of the book, which consists of this rekindling of the relationship between Emily and her first love from high school, Gen, is excellently done. It's everything a romance novel (because no matter how many allusions to the Greeks and Harvard you put in, this is, like so much 'literary fiction' marketed today, a good, old-fashioned romance novel) ought to be; thrilling, heart-wrenching and genuinely arousing. The sex scenes between Gen and Emily are gorgeously written, graphic without being seedy, detailed without the detail feeling gratuitous. READ MORE Alas, as soon as this relationship starts to enter the Ross-and-Rachel-esque second and third rounds of well-intentioned misunderstandings and innocent untruths, one's patience grows thin. I get the impression, from the somewhat cliched meta-narrative in the book, in which Emily's new agent tells her that her book's ending needs to be padded out, that perhaps there was pressure on Rutkoski to do the same. If so, they've done her a disservice. The protracted romantic tension is irritating rather than exciting. Also, unfortunately, the cast of spunky, ever-understanding friends that pop up here and there are almost too annoying to be borne, and one senses through them Rutkoski's history as a writer of YA and children's fiction. Even so, many readers are desperately seeking accounts of spunky friends and the vicarious comfort of lovers' turmoil, and this novel will no doubt be adored by them.
Daily Mail
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Heartbreak and troubles abound in this weeks literary fiction: The Scrapbook by Heather Clark, Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski, The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey
The Scrapbook by Heather Clark (Jonathan Cape £18.99, 256pp) The discovery of a scrapbook belonging to the author's grandfather, who helped liberate Dachau during the Second World War, inspired this not quite historical novel which examines the moral implications of the past for those living in the present. Anna, a Harvard student, has fallen hard for Christophe, who is studying architecture in Hamburg, and spends every holiday with him there, discussing literature, her grandfather's experience in the war and the still visible legacies of both Nazism and the Allied bombing campaign. Yet Christophe won't commit fully to the relationship. What's more, he is vague about the wartime role of his own grandfather, whom he insists joined the German resistance. The novel's architecture feels excessively engineered at times but Anna and Christophe's restlessly intelligent conversations raise juicy questions about the extent to which individuals are complicit with a nation's history. Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski (Virago £16.99, 368pp) This sexy, summer romance slips down as easily as oysters and champagne. Emily has walked out of her ten-year marriage to wealthy, proprietorial Jack when she bumps into Gen, her first love and a woman whom she has never got over – not that Emily dared admit this to herself before. While Emily and Gen, who is now a world-class athlete, embark on a tentative reunion, Jack is refusing to acknowledge the marriage has ended, while also fighting Emily for custody of their two children. Yet Emily and Gen soon find themselves in choppy waters, scrutinised at every turn by the Press, and neither of them the giddy teenagers they were when they first met. Rutkoski neatly tucks familiar ideas about ambition, self-hood and desire inside disarmingly glistening prose to produce a sweetly giddy novel which even the inevitable ending can't throw off track. The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey (Granta £16.99, 240pp) You can start Catherine Lacey's fictionalised memoir – or should that be autobiographical novel? – at the end if you like: it makes no difference. A book in two parts, one printed upside down, to mimic the structure of the Mobius strip from which it takes its name, this offers two versions – one presented as memoir, the other as fiction – of the same story, namely Lacey's real-life break up with the American writer Jesse Ball. Both narratives explore the passivity of grief and the parallels between heartbreak and the loss of religious faith, but there's not enough synergy between the two to justify the concept. Lacey is a bracing experimentalist but you can't help suspect she's tried to give literary sophistication to what would otherwise feel like a rather ugly attack on her ex.
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski review – some of the best sex scenes I've read this year
Sex is notoriously difficult to write. Some authors avoid it entirely; even those who have been called great can come a cropper. Which is why I want to start this review by saying that the sex scenes in Ordinary Love are some of the best I have read this year, and that Marie Rutkoski has a facility for writing physical intimacy that can elude even some of our most gifted authors. Her voice has been compared to that of Sally Rooney. I don't see much of that in this novel beyond a Rooneyesque ability to write sex well, but that is a talent worth noting. Ordinary Love is a queer romance that tells the story of Emily and Gen, teenage sweethearts who break up in college and reunite in their 30s, their paths having diverged dramatically. Emily marries Jack, who is wealthy and emotionally abusive. When she sees Gen again, she is in the process of leaving him for the second time (the novel opens with a scene vividly depicting the dealbreaker: it is violence against a child that finally does it). Gen, meanwhile, has become an Olympic athlete and serial womaniser. Both are carrying the wounds of their adolescent relationship, which is recounted in flashback, and the homophobia they faced, particularly from Emily's father. In one particularly moving scene, Gen's grandmother – who raised her after her mother died from opioid addiction – counters his bigotry by making a toast: 'To my granddaughter. I love you. I love everything about you. I am so proud.' It is in her exploration of the intricacies of family, as well as romantic relationships, that Rutkoski is at her most impressive. Parenthood and childhood are explored, but so are kinship care and the notion of surrogate family – Gen's grandmother offers kindness to Emily where her own parents have fallen short. The relationship between Emily and her emotionally distant mother is particularly well rendered. As for Emily and Jack's marriage, we soon realise that Emily is in the grip of coercive control. This is done subtly; what Rutkoski doesn't say is as important as what she does. With great economy she conveys how Emily tiptoes around the threat of Jack's displeasure, as well as his facility for manipulation as a way of wielding power (when she feeds the baby formula, his response, before he hits her with a verbal sledgehammer, is 'bewildered, disappointed, yet with the expression of someone trying to be gentle'). I have heard it remarked of American fiction that too often the protagonists don't seem to have any friends. This is not the case here: Ordinary Love is replete with friends, and some of the best writing comes in the novel's exploration of how they try to save Emily from Jack, only for him to isolate her almost completely. Emily's regret, and her attempts to repair these friendships, are so richly written that they almost overshadow the central romance between Emily and Gen, which despite the various stumbling blocks to happiness is somehow more straightforward, and less nuanced, than these female friendships. Perhaps it is because we see little of Gen's interior life in comparison with Emily's, although it should be noted that we do get to meet her friends, too. Ordinary Love never sags. Rutkoski has written a page-turner, and her prose is generally good. However, every few pages there is a turn of phrase or a metaphor that makes my teeth itch. The first I highlighted was 'snow scalloped into drifts like thoughts that start small and then amount to something'. That's not too bad, you might think, but then we have '[it] felt like the architectural expression of PTSD, where things vanished like bad memories', and (the unintentionally comical) 'She made Emily feel like an egg without its shell', and 'Gen felt distant now, like a half-finished daydream, as did Emily's youth'. Perhaps most egregious of all: 'Emily wanted Gen so badly it was like how people want what they can never have.' How much you enjoy this book will depend on your tolerance for this sort of thing. Mine is generally low, but I pressed on. The plot zipped along and the clumsy metaphors seemed to drop off by the second half, I suspect owing to an editor's guillotine. To quote the text: 'The past was done, over; it isn't a novel you can revise until you get it right.' One more round of revision in this case would have been no bad thing. Saying that, Ordinary Love is still superior to the vast majority of books in a similar vein, and it has much to recommend it – not least the fact that the sex is very good indeed. Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
