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Reviews: September/October 2017 View full imagePages for Her Debra Spark ’84 is a professor at Colby College. Her most recent novel is Unknown Caller. What is love? Of what are we capable, and what can—or should—we ask from our family members and intimate partners? Sylvia Brownrigg’s latest novel, Pages for Her, reads like a contemporary Symposium, in which two whip-smart Yale alumnae try to puzzle out desire in the wake of past satisfactions and midlife disappointments. Flannery and Anne had a powerful six-month affair when Flannery was a sensitive undergraduate and Anne a more forceful graduate student. (Brownrigg’s previous novel, Pages for You, concerns the two women in their younger years.) Even after the relationship is over, it is never far from Flannery’s mind, especially when she returns to speak at a writer’s conference at Yale and the two meet again. At times, the characters find themselves loving “simply,” as Anne says of her fondness for her nephew. But more often, and even when things are good, love is complicated, causing the self to develop, or to diminish. Flannery is crowded out by her narcissist husband, an internationally successful artist. Anne describes her own more successful marriage as “call and response, the gears moving, as new geographies led to traded perceptions that were part of layered conversations, which in turn became memories on which you continued building, brick by brick, your adult self.” A book that opens with a complaint about the weather in San Francisco might not seem promising, but even the book’s quotidian observations illustrate how compellingly perceptive the characters are—and how rewardingly surprising and precise Brownrigg’s language is. Though passion was once the focus of both women’s lives, they now contend with varieties of love, and also distaste—a problem perhaps familiar to their classmates, who are not much discussed in this novel, but whose real-life counterparts are, of course, the readers of this magazine.
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