Love and Ruin -- Take 2

I struggled a bit with Love and Ruin, but having had some time to reflect on it, I think I like it.  But man, was it hard to read.

***Note: this review contains something akin to spoilers if you don't already know the general outlines of the history of Martha and Ernest's relationship.  If you do, I'm not likely to spoil anything.***

I had a couple of intertwined issues.  One was with the relationship as profiled in the book.  It was suffocating to read about, which I suppose means it was well-drawn on the pages.  I wouldn't necessarily have told you at the time that I thought the book was beautifully written, but it clearly had the desired effect -- or at least an effect; whether or not it was the desired one, I'm not sure.  Here's what it cam down to though: the tension in the relationship between the pure joy, deep love, and functional partnership on the one hand with the constricting jail walls that that very same relationship imposed on Martha were untenable.

And that's the second thread in this intertwined struggle I had.  I was at the part of the book where the relationship begins to sour while S and I were out camping.  I woke up in the middle of one of our nights out with a start, thinking about this book and how trapped Martha was.  She was desperately in love with Ernest, and had also taken on a role in his boys' lives that was important to both them and her.  At the same time, she was struggling with her writing and her career because she couldn't spread her wings.  She was -- I already said suffocating, but I'm saying it again -- suffocating.  And so was I, when I woke up in the middle of the night.  For the second time in my life, I had a reasonably serious attack of claustrophobia.  I flew out of bed, opened the door, and breathed in the cold night air in order to clear my head.  Was the oppressiveness of the relationship in the book that led to my feeling of panic?  I have no idea.  But I do find it quite curious that that's what I woke up thinking about.

So far, it sounds like I didn't like this book, but that's not a complete assessment.  It did take me some time to get into it, but once I did, I made much quicker progress and I couldn't escape (even in sleep) the emotional depth of their relationship.  It's hard to say that such a book is not well-crafted.  So maybe I didn't exactly like it, but it got under my skin in a slightly troubling way.