Imperfect Love

By DAVID MOGOLOV

An Almost Perfect Moment
Binnie Kirshenbaum
336 pages. Ecco. $23.95.

An Almost Perfect Moment is a book that has a lot to say about love, written by an author who is clearly in love with her novel. Binnie Kirshenbaum’s writing is a whirl, a frolic. She is so infatuated with her characters and so excited about her story that her voice almost sounds from the pages like it’s a book on tape. This is a good thing—her enthusiasm is contagious, and the book gains momentum with almost every page. It’s also a bad thing, because, like the object of so many unequal loves, Kirshenbaum’s characters are sometimes smothered by her attention, by her little prods. Just as they begin to express themselves, they are shouted down.

The novel is saturated with Kirshenbaum’s voice. A certain commenting tone, a knowing condescension hangs over every scene in An Almost Perfect Moment. Hers is a voice most similar to that we hear from one of her characters, Miriam Kessler, one of a gaggle of Jewish Brooklyn women who is wise about reality, who isn't going to express any shock about a person's foibles. It's a voice that starts a paragraph with a sentence like "Poor, foolish Joanne Clarke." One that, immediately after Miriam's daughter Valentine gives her a not-entirely truthful reason for a sudden interest in skiing, asks from above, "Was Valentine Kessler becoming something of a prevaricator?" This presence is both necessary and distracting. Necessary because the author is very funny, and her levity is valuable in a novel that hacks through some tough social tangles. Without it, people would refer to this as “that novel about the girl with the religious crisis, and you know, the teenage pregnancy.”

Unfortunately, at other times she is loudly stating the apparent, making wry observations from above that would be better made by presentation than by commentary. We see elsewhere that she’s capable of this sort of more natural humor. After pages devoted to the otherworldly beauty and calm of her main character, 15-year-old Valentine, we are brought back to reality when we finally hear her voice after 19 pages of silence, as she greets her math teacher, the object of her love: “Like a vision, but no vision ever had an accent like Valentine Kessler’s, a thick-as-thieves Brooklynese, as if her larynx were lodged on the roof of her mouth instead of where it belonged, and coming down like a sledgehammer on the consonants… It was an accent for which elocutions were designed. ‘Mis-Ta War-sil-eS-Ki,’ she said.” Back to Earth. Fast.

Similarly, the structure of Kirshenbaum’s novel works for and against the reader. Composed of short, rapidly shifting scenes, the novel presents multiple overlapping stories and perspectives, each scene coming on the heels of the last at a sprint. The novel’s title could well describe many moments in the book, just before the rude interruption of the narrator or of another scene. The positionless juxtapositions—all juxta, no position—often halt a scene just as it is gaining momentum. The payoff is often less than the price.

The rapid scene-jumping also creates a temptation for Kirshenbaum to show us the doings of peripheral characters that don’t do anything interesting enough on the periphery to take our eyes from the main action. One scene that features the after-work social activities of the gym teacher, Miss Marks, serves little purpose other than to say, “Whoa, man. Teenage pregnancy is serious. Really.” Kirshenbaum is better than this. Still, scenes such as this are few, and while they don’t distract terribly, they also don’t add much.

The presence of the narrator/author also becomes overwhelming in another way: Kirshenbaum’s heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. The shadow cast by her foreshadowing is that of a solar eclipse. Our surroundings become insignificant in relation to the far-off unknown. We lose site of the here-and-now. There’s nothing subtle about this. Kirshenbaum isn’t presenting us with tea leaves hinting at the future. Instead, she gives us a Time Out events listing.
 
But the lack of subtlety is also welcoming. Kirshenbaum, even when she's writing about her teenage characters, is honest in a grown-up, no nonsense way. We know exactly what she thinks about the matter at hand. Take love, which we're concerned with during Tu B’Av. She shows us love as, almost without exception, a selfish emotion or the result of a misunderstanding. The closest thing we see to storybook love is between friends. The way Miriam and The Girls—her three best friends—treat one another is unselfish, concerned, and approving. They are unflinchingly honest with one another. They are loyal to one another in all things. And they never miss an opportunity to compliment one another. A person needs these things. And while these are not romantic notions, they are the basic elements of our understanding of love.

But the love between Miriam and The Girls is not a love of passion—it is steadfast allegiance (an allegiance largely, though not completely, founded on Jewish unity and trust in their neighborhood, a matter on which Miriam has carefully instructed Valentine). Nor is it like the love Miriam has for Valentine, unwavering and blind. She chides herself some for not understanding her daughter, but this is no great failing. Mothers love their daughters, regardless of whether they feel they know them. She even sees it as a virtue. “Frankly, Miriam was just as glad that she could not read Valentine as if the kid were an open book. It was her philosophy that there were some things a mother was better off not knowing, and she was confident that if there were any serious problems, those she would see.” Elsewhere in the book she shows more strained, even broken parent/child relationships, but always they are shown to include a good deal of loyalty and sacrifice.

Her real venom is for romantic love. The miserable center of the anti-love story is  the relationship between Joanne Clarke, the high school biology teacher, and math teacher John Wosileski. Which is more awful, Joanne’s reasons for pursuing John, or John’s reasons for settling for Joanne? Is John more animated by his fear of loneliness and of his parents than Joanne is by her desire to rid herself of the responsibility of caring for her invalid father? Valentine's crush on her math teacher is genuine insofar as she thinks her feelings for him have something to do with qualities he himself possesses. Joanne's interest in John, however, is rooted in nothing more than his availability and her loneliness. John's acceptance of her is no better; he finds Joanne Clarke repugnant.

Compared to the repulsion these two feel for one another, Miriam’s pining for Ron, the husband who abandoned her and her baby, is downright romantic. He’s not worth holding onto, and late at night, when nobody else is looking, that knowledge is plain on her face. She’s made a mistake of love, and her chance has passed. And so when others are around, she does not speak of it. To the public eye, she has moved on, erroneously supporting the notion that it is better to have loved and lost. The only real evidence for that notion is Valentine—Miriam may have lost Ron, and all hope for companionship, but her daughter is undeniably proof that in her case, it was better that she loved Ron. Valentine may even be reason enough for her secret love to continue—if the product of a failed love is a true one, then that may be argument enough for love.