Love Is a Canoe: A Novel - Hardcover
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his legendary, decades-old book on love and relationships, has won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike. He and his beloved wife lived a relatively peaceful life in upstate New York. But now it's 2010, and Peter's wife has just died. Completely lost, he passes the time with a woman he admires but doesn't love-and he begins to look back through the pages of his book and question homilies such as:
A good marriage is a canoe-it needs care and isn't meant to hold too much-no more than two adults and a few kids.
It's advice he has famously doled out for decades. But what is it worth?
Then Peter receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor who wants to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Marriage Is a Canoe with a contest for struggling couples. The prize? An afternoon with Peter and a chance to save their relationship.
The contest ensnares its creator in the largely opaque politics of her publishing house while it introduces the reader to couples in various states of distress, including a shy thirtysomething Brooklynite and her charismatic and entrepreneurial husband, who may just be a bit too charismatic for the good of their marriage. There's the middle-aged publisher whose imposing manner has managed to impose loneliness on her for longer than she cares to admit. And then there is Peter, who must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe if he is going to help the contest's winners and find a way to love again.
In Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank delivers a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of marriage and the difficulty of repairing the damage when well-intentioned people forget how to be good to each other.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Ben Schrank is president and publisher of Razorbill, a Penguin imprint that is home to many award-winning and New York Times–bestselling books for children and young adults. Ben is also the author of the novels Consent and Miracle Man. He wrote "Ben's Life," a monthly column for Seventeen magazine, in the 1990s. He grew up in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and son.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Emily Babson, July 2010
“I got everything,” Eli called out. He carried his bike in one hand so its top tube was level with his ear and he swung a canvas bag full of groceries in the other hand.
Emily smiled at him from the middle of their apartment, where she stood next to the kitchen island. She had been examining a defrosting piecrust.
“Did you get cornstarch?” she asked.
Eli let their front door slam behind him, dropped the bike so it bounced once before coming to a lean against the wall, and came through the big parlor and into the kitchen. He kissed her. He smelled like iron and oil from his bicycle factory and then underneath that, the smell she’d given up trying to properly name and now just thought of as green olives, which made no sense. She loved his smell. He had dark hair that he wore a little long and his eyes were brown but sometimes she saw them flash violet. She let go of the piecrust and put a hand on his chest.
“I forgot that. I got everything else, though.”
“Blueberry pie won’t work without it.”
“Sure it will. It should. Anyway, we must have some.” He kissed her again. Eli Corelli was as tall as his wife, though he was thicker, so in photographs he looked shorter. When Emily first met him after a lecture he’d given at the New School, she thought he had legs like tree trunks and she loved that about him immediately, that he was so solid that if she were ever inclined to throw herself at him, he could catch her.
Though it was Saturday, they’d both been working all morning and now they planned to spend the rest of the day making a pie for a contest held by Emily’s sister, Sherry. Emily didn’t often go to Sherry’s parties, which Sherry threw when she was between acting jobs, but she liked the theme of this one.
“I called her and got the scoop,” Emily said. “There’s two categories, sweet and savory. And then a final big winner at the end. So our blueberry could go up against chicken potpie. Though it’s too hot for that.”
“I hope going sweet was the right move.” Eli slipped his hands around Emily’s waist.
Emily pushed the piecrust around on the counter. She’d bought it yesterday and it would take at least another hour to thaw. She’d said yes to her little sister’s pie party on Monday before her shyness held her back and now she was nervous. Emily had long ago accepted that Sherry was social and she was not. Sherry was striking to look at. She had black hair while Emily’s was only very dark brown. And Sherry’s face was all angles so her photographer friends loved to take her picture because of all the shadows they could find when they lit her. Emily’s face was softer and rounder and she was quicker to tan. Most of the time she had a spray of freckles over her nose and cheeks. She had her hair cut in bangs to contrast with her features. The sisters weren’t best friends—Sherry’s best friends were actors like her, and they changed every year or two. Emily was just three years older than Sherry. They were equally protective of each other. And if Emily was being honest, she would have to admit that she was closer to Sherry than anyone else in New York. Emily had been too shy in her twenties and then she’d surprised herself and everyone else when she met Eli and married him. But instead of becoming more confident because she had a husband who everyone loved, she had come to live too much inside their marriage. She beat herself up about this situation and often thought up schemes that would change the dynamic before it solidified and she completely lost her identity to their coupledom. Before she was with Eli, she had trained herself to love to go to yoga at least a few times a week, to switch to merlot after a Manhattan or to just start with merlot, to not feel remorseful when she went shopping for clothes and brought home the same charcoal cashmere cardigan over and over again. She had learned to care for herself. Now she was sure she could work herself out of this newish state, and she believed that she absolutely had to before they had children. Emily was aware of the calculation that went into her decision to go to this party, aware of how purposeful she was and how she was bothered by it, but she was determined to go anyway. Eli never seemed to tear himself up the way she did. She loved Eli. But she was often frustrated with herself and jealous of her husband.
“The more I think about it, the more I don’t see how we’ll win with straight-ahead blueberry.” Eli opened some cabinets. “Blueberries are in season. Everybody is going to show up with the same pie.”
“We don’t have to win. We just want to make a yummy pie, that’s all. Not some avant-garde bacon and peach monstrosity. I want ours to be liked.”
“Liked? No, baby. It’s easy to make a likable pie. I want to see people fucking love whatever we make. I want to see forks go in mouths and swoons happen. I want to see finger licking, not liking.” Eli wouldn’t stop moving around the kitchen. He frowned. “I want to help you cook this thing, but what’s always weird about Saturday afternoons is that I need a nap.”
“I won’t sleep, but I’ll go in there with you.”
They held hands and walked into their bedroom. They rented the parlor floor of an oversize limestone town house on Clinton Street in Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn. The tall front windows were near exactly like the ones Emily had dreamed of when she first came to New York a decade earlier. Emily had repainted and washed those windows when they moved in. The rest of the place was good, though unloved around its edges, with a noisy refrigerator and a parquet floor that would be amazing if their landlord would just sand and polish and care for it. They did their best to keep everything clean and bright, except for the bedroom, which had chocolate-brown carpet and blackout shades. Eli had painted the room a deep red when they moved in two years earlier, just a few months after they were married. It was a much sexier color than Emily would have ever thought she would like in a bedroom. When her mother had come down for a conference and stayed on their couch, Emily had kept the door to their bedroom shut.
They lay down on the bed, over the sheets.
“Did you get enough done today?” Emily asked.
“Nope. The boys in Japan want eighteen more bikes. And I’m falling behind schedule. I don’t love the stress.”
“Send them a pie.” She laughed and her eyes crinkled. She knew he liked seeing her laugh. He brushed back her bangs and kissed her.
“Maybe I will if we can make one worthy of their undying love...”
Eli kept talking about work. His six-year-old company, Roman Street Bicycles, made single-speed bike frames that were in demand all over the world. Eli was having trouble managing growth. He was determined to touch each frame and get involved with every build, and if he kept meeting demand, soon that wouldn’t be possible. Emily was thinking about work, too, about a proposal she was doing for a company that wanted to re-brand a line of cotton blankets.
“What’s a good name for a blanket?” she wondered aloud.
“I knew you weren’t listening.” Eli buried his face in her neck. Warm blanket, she thought. Soft blanket. There are so many things, Emily thought, that gain nothing from being reconsidered. Her group had been paid well a few times for suggesting that a company not change a thing. But a good brand consultant couldn’t do that every time. Eli threw an arm over her. His hand slipped behind her back. It amazed her that after four years together, they could fall asleep intertwined. She thought she would need an abstract word in front of blanket, Moomja or something. Eli. The Eli blanket ...
“Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me for one minute before you fall asleep.” He did and she was happy that she knew what to ask for from Eli. She would make that trade and stay too prim with everyone else but never with him. To be too ensconced in your marriage? Why was that bad? Emily did not consider herself a dreamy person. She believed life was made up of trade-offs and this was surely a fair one.
She woke up an hour later with her brow sweaty. She wiped her forehead and blew out air a few times, opened her eyes wide to see in that dark room. She smelled onions frying. She pulled her hair back and went into the kitchen. Eli was mixing something in a little bowl. He was in a pair of khaki shorts and nothing else. The Roman Street Bicycles logo, made up of the letters RSB wound through the spokes of a bicycle wheel, was tattooed on his left shoulder blade. Sometimes she scratched at it, as if she could take it off with her nails. Eli didn’t like it when she did that. Now she touched his back without scratching him and looked around the messy kitchen.
“What happened?” she asked. “What’d you do to my piecrust?”
Eli was looking into a glass bowl. Bits of egg bobbed in a green sauce that didn’t seem like it could possibly set. There were mounds of vegetables on cutting boards and spices everywhere. Butter was smeared in pie plates. Though she didn’t see anything cooking in a pan, the smell was now more complex than just onions.
“I had an idea,” Eli said.
“This is not blueberry pie. I love you, Eli. But this doesn’t look like a winner.”
“No it is, don’t worry. I saw eggs in the fridge and we have potatoes and there’s prosciutto that I bought with that old Staubitz gift certificate. But the green sauce is the key. That’s our secret weapon. I called my uncle Frito. We’ll go savory with a breakfast pie for dinner that’s actually like a timbale and w...
“I got everything,” Eli called out. He carried his bike in one hand so its top tube was level with his ear and he swung a canvas bag full of groceries in the other hand.
Emily smiled at him from the middle of their apartment, where she stood next to the kitchen island. She had been examining a defrosting piecrust.
“Did you get cornstarch?” she asked.
Eli let their front door slam behind him, dropped the bike so it bounced once before coming to a lean against the wall, and came through the big parlor and into the kitchen. He kissed her. He smelled like iron and oil from his bicycle factory and then underneath that, the smell she’d given up trying to properly name and now just thought of as green olives, which made no sense. She loved his smell. He had dark hair that he wore a little long and his eyes were brown but sometimes she saw them flash violet. She let go of the piecrust and put a hand on his chest.
“I forgot that. I got everything else, though.”
“Blueberry pie won’t work without it.”
“Sure it will. It should. Anyway, we must have some.” He kissed her again. Eli Corelli was as tall as his wife, though he was thicker, so in photographs he looked shorter. When Emily first met him after a lecture he’d given at the New School, she thought he had legs like tree trunks and she loved that about him immediately, that he was so solid that if she were ever inclined to throw herself at him, he could catch her.
Though it was Saturday, they’d both been working all morning and now they planned to spend the rest of the day making a pie for a contest held by Emily’s sister, Sherry. Emily didn’t often go to Sherry’s parties, which Sherry threw when she was between acting jobs, but she liked the theme of this one.
“I called her and got the scoop,” Emily said. “There’s two categories, sweet and savory. And then a final big winner at the end. So our blueberry could go up against chicken potpie. Though it’s too hot for that.”
“I hope going sweet was the right move.” Eli slipped his hands around Emily’s waist.
Emily pushed the piecrust around on the counter. She’d bought it yesterday and it would take at least another hour to thaw. She’d said yes to her little sister’s pie party on Monday before her shyness held her back and now she was nervous. Emily had long ago accepted that Sherry was social and she was not. Sherry was striking to look at. She had black hair while Emily’s was only very dark brown. And Sherry’s face was all angles so her photographer friends loved to take her picture because of all the shadows they could find when they lit her. Emily’s face was softer and rounder and she was quicker to tan. Most of the time she had a spray of freckles over her nose and cheeks. She had her hair cut in bangs to contrast with her features. The sisters weren’t best friends—Sherry’s best friends were actors like her, and they changed every year or two. Emily was just three years older than Sherry. They were equally protective of each other. And if Emily was being honest, she would have to admit that she was closer to Sherry than anyone else in New York. Emily had been too shy in her twenties and then she’d surprised herself and everyone else when she met Eli and married him. But instead of becoming more confident because she had a husband who everyone loved, she had come to live too much inside their marriage. She beat herself up about this situation and often thought up schemes that would change the dynamic before it solidified and she completely lost her identity to their coupledom. Before she was with Eli, she had trained herself to love to go to yoga at least a few times a week, to switch to merlot after a Manhattan or to just start with merlot, to not feel remorseful when she went shopping for clothes and brought home the same charcoal cashmere cardigan over and over again. She had learned to care for herself. Now she was sure she could work herself out of this newish state, and she believed that she absolutely had to before they had children. Emily was aware of the calculation that went into her decision to go to this party, aware of how purposeful she was and how she was bothered by it, but she was determined to go anyway. Eli never seemed to tear himself up the way she did. She loved Eli. But she was often frustrated with herself and jealous of her husband.
“The more I think about it, the more I don’t see how we’ll win with straight-ahead blueberry.” Eli opened some cabinets. “Blueberries are in season. Everybody is going to show up with the same pie.”
“We don’t have to win. We just want to make a yummy pie, that’s all. Not some avant-garde bacon and peach monstrosity. I want ours to be liked.”
“Liked? No, baby. It’s easy to make a likable pie. I want to see people fucking love whatever we make. I want to see forks go in mouths and swoons happen. I want to see finger licking, not liking.” Eli wouldn’t stop moving around the kitchen. He frowned. “I want to help you cook this thing, but what’s always weird about Saturday afternoons is that I need a nap.”
“I won’t sleep, but I’ll go in there with you.”
They held hands and walked into their bedroom. They rented the parlor floor of an oversize limestone town house on Clinton Street in Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn. The tall front windows were near exactly like the ones Emily had dreamed of when she first came to New York a decade earlier. Emily had repainted and washed those windows when they moved in. The rest of the place was good, though unloved around its edges, with a noisy refrigerator and a parquet floor that would be amazing if their landlord would just sand and polish and care for it. They did their best to keep everything clean and bright, except for the bedroom, which had chocolate-brown carpet and blackout shades. Eli had painted the room a deep red when they moved in two years earlier, just a few months after they were married. It was a much sexier color than Emily would have ever thought she would like in a bedroom. When her mother had come down for a conference and stayed on their couch, Emily had kept the door to their bedroom shut.
They lay down on the bed, over the sheets.
“Did you get enough done today?” Emily asked.
“Nope. The boys in Japan want eighteen more bikes. And I’m falling behind schedule. I don’t love the stress.”
“Send them a pie.” She laughed and her eyes crinkled. She knew he liked seeing her laugh. He brushed back her bangs and kissed her.
“Maybe I will if we can make one worthy of their undying love...”
Eli kept talking about work. His six-year-old company, Roman Street Bicycles, made single-speed bike frames that were in demand all over the world. Eli was having trouble managing growth. He was determined to touch each frame and get involved with every build, and if he kept meeting demand, soon that wouldn’t be possible. Emily was thinking about work, too, about a proposal she was doing for a company that wanted to re-brand a line of cotton blankets.
“What’s a good name for a blanket?” she wondered aloud.
“I knew you weren’t listening.” Eli buried his face in her neck. Warm blanket, she thought. Soft blanket. There are so many things, Emily thought, that gain nothing from being reconsidered. Her group had been paid well a few times for suggesting that a company not change a thing. But a good brand consultant couldn’t do that every time. Eli threw an arm over her. His hand slipped behind her back. It amazed her that after four years together, they could fall asleep intertwined. She thought she would need an abstract word in front of blanket, Moomja or something. Eli. The Eli blanket ...
“Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me for one minute before you fall asleep.” He did and she was happy that she knew what to ask for from Eli. She would make that trade and stay too prim with everyone else but never with him. To be too ensconced in your marriage? Why was that bad? Emily did not consider herself a dreamy person. She believed life was made up of trade-offs and this was surely a fair one.
She woke up an hour later with her brow sweaty. She wiped her forehead and blew out air a few times, opened her eyes wide to see in that dark room. She smelled onions frying. She pulled her hair back and went into the kitchen. Eli was mixing something in a little bowl. He was in a pair of khaki shorts and nothing else. The Roman Street Bicycles logo, made up of the letters RSB wound through the spokes of a bicycle wheel, was tattooed on his left shoulder blade. Sometimes she scratched at it, as if she could take it off with her nails. Eli didn’t like it when she did that. Now she touched his back without scratching him and looked around the messy kitchen.
“What happened?” she asked. “What’d you do to my piecrust?”
Eli was looking into a glass bowl. Bits of egg bobbed in a green sauce that didn’t seem like it could possibly set. There were mounds of vegetables on cutting boards and spices everywhere. Butter was smeared in pie plates. Though she didn’t see anything cooking in a pan, the smell was now more complex than just onions.
“I had an idea,” Eli said.
“This is not blueberry pie. I love you, Eli. But this doesn’t look like a winner.”
“No it is, don’t worry. I saw eggs in the fridge and we have potatoes and there’s prosciutto that I bought with that old Staubitz gift certificate. But the green sauce is the key. That’s our secret weapon. I called my uncle Frito. We’ll go savory with a breakfast pie for dinner that’s actually like a timbale and w...
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- PublisherSarah Crichton Books
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 0374192499
- ISBN 13 9780374192495
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages352
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