Jaguars don’t kiss horses

Spanning several decades, the stories in this book show the loosely and serendipitously connected characters that orbit the title characters, Louisa and Bear. Starting with Louisa’s cousin Lizzie, who becomes pregnant after her first and only sexual encounter with the husband of her history professor.  Still unsure if she will keep the child, she leaves Yale and moves back in with her father. The pregnancy is difficult and soon her estranged mother moves back into the family home to care for her. The time they spend together helps Lizzie understand what happened to her parents marriage and leads her to decide to out the baby up for adoption.

The second story introduces Louisa and Bear, young lovers at Princeton, coming together and breaking apart over several years. The rest of the characters and stories spool out from there, sometimes a minor character in one takes center stage later on. The world these people inhabit takes on more color and meaning. The way families are happy or they are not, the way people are happy or they are not, is explored with great tenderness.

Ms. Gornick’s writing is absolutely gorgeous:

“Outside, light is draining from the sky and shadow, sharp, like a parallelogram, grazes the piano-dusk, that chimerical rupture between day and night when tree branches and leaves and even the veins on the leaves appear for a fleeting instant more distinct, the edges no longer blurred by glare.”

While some of the stories and a couple of the characters seemed a little thin to me, the sumptuous prose and the ambitiousness of the book carried me along with great interest. Recommended.