Fighting Gravity

Ellie Rifkin is a nineteen-year-old college student from a privileged Jewish background when she meets forty-one-year-old professor Gerard Babineau. Already twice-divorced, he is a hard drinker, an ex-peacetime marine, and a practicing Catholic from southern Louisiana who is angry and complicated and renowned for his writing. Quite quickly they marry, have a child, and when Ellie is again pregnant, Babineau stops to help a motorist on the highway and is seriously injured, confined forever to a wheelchair. Their lives change, and the two must face hard truths about their relationship. Set in New England and Alabama, Fighting Gravity begins as an exploration of the complexities of love between an older man and younger woman, and ultimately raises larger questions of human connection, commitment, faith, marital and parental responsibility, and the nature of fate. In the end, Ellie discovers the importance, for her own sake and that of her children, of shaping her own destiny.

"This highly charged story ... covers a wide emotional spectrum, ...without becoming a soap opera. . ."- Library Journal. 

"...[a] meticulous and wrenching tale of love and the will to survive. ...This streamlined and potent novel ... is indeed a tragic and haunting tale."- Booklist

 

"...[Rambach's] prose is wiry, deft and piercingly descriptive; she gets well inside emotional events while keeping her detached regard unruffled."-New York Times

"... a tragic tale, bravely and cleanly told....[Rambach] writes with lean language --  disarmingly direct --  but with deft, almost seamless shifts of time and place that create tension, suspense. She handles voice very neatly, ...The writing is powerfully concise, a poet's prose..."
- The Baltimore Sun:

"...it is an astonishing work, an agonizing, moving short novel that owes nothing to life but inspiration. ...Rambach has painted an intense, precisely observed picture of life with a writer and a much older man that is fresh, controlled, and a little bit scary. "
- The Boston Globe

" ... a chronicle of rage, resistance and finally explosive hurt...[Rambach] tries to give each character a voice; in doing so she also tries to find a way to give voice to the silenced people who inhabit the wheelchair world...[and] tries to understand how physical devastation precipitates psychic destruction.  - The Times-Picayune