You Will Learn to Love Me

When Kate Willoughby realizes her love for her child, Eliza, far exceeds any passion she's ever felt for her husband, Hank, she knows her marriage is over. How Kate dissolves her dormant relationship is the powerful and haunting story of Susan Chace's You Will Learn to Love Me.
"In separation begins the individual," Kate says. Her efforts to find a path to emotional freedom involve psychic battles of the most ferocious sort but in retaking her life Kate achieves a hard-won peace.

The painful end to a dormant marriage built on deluded expectations is the subject of Chace's sparely written, quietly powerful second novel (after Intimacy). Narrator Kate Willoughby contrasts the distaste she feels for her manipulative, dictatorial husband with the obsessive love she lavishes on their young daughter, Eliza. Hank Willoughby is a banker; Kate writes PR for a brokerage firm, and her language is as measured as economic bulletins. Running counterpoint to Kate's decision to end the marriage is the death of the mother of one of Eliza's kindergarten classmates, and its effect on Eliza as she dimly understands the finality of that separation and tries to deny her parents' imminent disunion. One does not wonder at Kate's determination to rid herself of the mean-mouthed man who was well aware she didn't love him when they married, especially when Hank admits to a bizarre risk he took in marrying her. Chace herself takes the risk of making her protagonist difficult to warm to: Kate is emotionally repressed, severely self-contained, even surly; she refers to herself as "a blank," doesn't communicate with Hank but shares intimate details with virtual strangers. As she comes to terms with loss, however, Kate achieves self-knowledge and wholeness-"in separation begins the individual"-and the elegiac ending proves surprisingly affecting.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chace's second novel presents a family in which "life jams together . . . like objects brought so close that all the edges blur"--the key object being Eliza, an adored six-year-old. Seen from the viewpoint of Kate, this family consists not of husband, wife, and child, but of parents and child, with Kate hating herself for her inability to love Eliza's father, Hank, the husband 13 years her senior whom she cannot love. Meanwhile, Isobel, the terminally ill mother of Eliza's school chum, Benjamin, attends "Goodbye School . . . a school to learn how to let go," and thereby sets the stage for Kate's confrontation with her own separation from Eliza as the child inevitably grows into an increasingly larger world. Chace's austere, minimal language emphasizes the surrealistic edges of this doomed marriage in which the little girl is receptacle for the mangled hopes of her parents and the mother searches to fill her own emptiness. The finely crafted novel cuts to the heart of the interlocked emotions characteristic of so many tempestuous mother-daughter relationships. Whitney Scott

After eight years of marriage, Kate Willoughby has not learned to love her husband. She is increasingly bothered by his small lies and his attempts to remake her into his image of a perfect woman. Discovering that he may have known and loved her dead mother only heightens Kate's sense of betrayal and confusion. Unable and unwilling to find a common ground, she finds her marriage eroding. This second novel by the author of Intimacy (Plume, 1989) is filled with unsympathetic characters. Kate is as selfish as her husband is boorish, and her disappointment is carefully chronicled but unengaging. Not recommended.
Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., N.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.