This Is A Love Story by Jessica Soffer

For half a century, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park. As young lovers dizzy with possibility, as parents ground down by the work of raising a child, as artists whose careers bloomed while their marriage weathered its private storms. Now Jane is dying, and Abe recounts their decades together in fragments: memories that arrive not in neat chronological order but in the scattered, associative way that grief demands.

Jessica Soffer’s latest novel positions itself as an intimate chronicle of enduring love, a story told through multiple perspectives, including those of Abe, Jane, their son Max, a student infatuated with Abe, and Central Park itself. It is a book preoccupied with memory, with art, with what remains when the body begins its final surrender. The ambition is clear. The execution proves more complicated.

The Problem of Address

The novel’s most distinctive feature is also its most exhausting. Soffer structures large portions of the narrative as Abe speaking directly to Jane, beginning sentence after sentence with variations of “You remember.” You remember the apartment. You remember the snow. You remember what you said. The technique aims for intimacy, for the particular shorthand of long marriage. Instead, it produces a relentless sameness, a rhythm that numbs rather than illuminates.

This is not a device deployed sparingly for effect. It saturates the opening chapters and returns throughout, creating a prose style that feels less like meditation and more like incantation. The reader understands what Soffer intends: to capture how couples narrate their shared history, to show Abe desperately holding onto Jane through the act of remembering together. But intention and impact diverge. What begins as poignant becomes formulaic, each memory arriving in the same grammatical package until the pattern itself becomes the story’s dominant presence.

Art Above All

The novel’s thematic center rests on the marriage between two artists: Jane, whose commitment to her visual work approaches religious devotion, and Abe, a writer haunted by questions of craft and legacy. Their son Max carries the wounds of being raised by parents whose creative lives consumed oxygen that might have gone to him. This is fertile territory, the collision between artistic calling and domestic obligation, between what we owe our work and what we owe the people who love us.

Soffer handles these questions with intelligence. Jane’s single-minded focus on her art is rendered without apology or easy judgment. Max’s resentment feels earned rather than manufactured. The novel understands that love can coexist with damage, that parents can fail their children even while loving them fiercely. When the book focuses on these genuine tensions, when it allows the situation to generate its own emotional power, it finds solid ground.

Central Park as Witness

The decision to give Central Park its own narrative voice represents Soffer’s boldest gambit. The park observes the decades of human drama unfolding within its boundaries, offering commentary on the fleeting nature of individual lives against the backdrop of communal space. For readers familiar with Manhattan, these passages may resonate with particular force, invoking the park’s role as the city’s green heart, its democratic commons.

Yet even this choice suffers from the novel’s broader affliction: overstatement, repetition, and a tendency to circle the same observations multiple times. The park reminds us that life continues, that we are small, that the quotidian persists. We understand. The point has been made. But Soffer returns to it, turns it over again, as if worried the reader might miss what has already been clearly established.

What Works Beneath

Strip away the stylistic flourishes and something worthwhile emerges. The story of Abe and Jane contains real complexity. Their marriage includes betrayal, reconciliation, and the slow work of choosing each other again. The portrait of Max, damaged but not destroyed by his childhood, searching for connection while protecting himself from it, has genuine psychological depth. Even the younger characters orbiting the main narrative possess their own distinct pains and longings.

The problem is not the material. The problem is what Soffer does with it. Every scene gets weighted with significance, every moment laden with meaning. The prose reaches constantly for poetry, for transcendence, until the accumulation becomes counterproductive. There is beauty here, sentences that land with real force, observations about love and loss, and the passage of time that strike true. But they arrive buried in passages that needed editing, in repetitions that dilute rather than intensify.

A Question of Patience

Soffer is clearly a writer who cares about language, about finding the precise word, about making prose do more than simply convey information. This is admirable. Literary fiction should be allowed its experiments, its departures from conventional storytelling. Some readers will find in this novel’s approach exactly what they’re seeking: a text that demands their full attention, that refuses easy consumption, that prioritizes feeling and image over plot momentum.

Others will struggle, as many reviewers already have, with a writing style that announces itself on every page. The fragmented structure, the constant direct address, and the poetic aspirations that sometimes achieve liftoff and sometimes remain earthbound. For these readers, and one must count among them, the experience becomes one of recognizing quality while simultaneously feeling exhausted by its delivery.

What remains frustrating is the gap between what this book is and what it might have been. The story deserves better than its telling. Abe and Jane, Max and the unnamed student, even Central Park itself: these elements contain sufficient power without the elaboration Soffer heaps upon them. Marriage is profound. Death is profound. Art and parenthood and the passage of fifty years are profound. They do not require a constant reminder of their profundity.

“This Is A Love Story” will find its audience among readers who prize style over narrative momentum, who want their fiction to feel worked over, considered, dense with intention. It is a book that announces its seriousness from the first page and maintains that tone throughout. Whether such seriousness translates to emotional impact depends entirely on how much repetition a reader can absorb before the pattern itself becomes the primary experience. The love story is there. Finding it requires excavating through layers of prose that alternately reveal and obscure what lies beneath.