Katie Kitamura’s third novel, A Separation, is about the end of a marriage between two wealthy white people, both of whom are writers. On its face, this premise sounds like a joke about clichés of the literary novel. The easiest way to make fun of an MFA student is to depict someone who has never been married, writing about the breakdown of a rich middle-aged couple’s marriage. And little reveals the insularity of novelists’ social backgrounds than the insistence on writing about people with their same unlikely job, as though being an author were some everyman profession. If anything at all shouldn’t still work, it’s both of these premises.



A SEPARATION by Katie Kitamura Riverhead Books, 240 pp., $25.00

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, novels chronicling the failure of marriages were briefly revolutionary, because of the way they bent both narrative and social conventions. For centuries previous, any story that wasn’t a tragedy ended in marriage. Central characters found each and vanished into one another like the point in a painting where the lines connect at the horizon. The novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, force their protagonists past the false harmonic ending of marriage and into the skin of continuance, the flesh and bone of ongoing routine. In the twentieth-century, particularly, the novel broke apart the marriage plot at the same as society was taking apart the ideas of marriage as permanent and necessarily good. The novel of adultery and divorce began to replace the novel of love. Marriage was no longer either an inevitability or a panacea. It no longer ended the story.

In The End of The Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick wrote about how the same changes that brought about the novel’s obsession with the breakdown of marriage also quickly ushered marriage out of relevance as a subject. Marriage is now only one potential event in a life of many equally weighted potential events, and, if a marriage fails, it is only an individual, not a societal or universal, failure. The fallibility of marriage is a story we already know. We have already faced the breakdown of this particular scaffolding, seen its dismantling effect change on the world. Love, while still the novel’s most popular subject, seemed a parochial lens on the human condition, an airless way of looking at the world, offering diminished returns.

That the married couples in these novels are often white, usually heterosexual, and almost invariably middle or upper middle class is no coincidence. The institution of marriage has traditionally brought rewards to only a certain segment of people; to see marriage as a goal and its breakdown as a tragedy only elevates the goals and tragedies of these same people, defining human experience by a narrow example and leaving the rest of us fragmented, stuck in the shadows, at best, offered imitations of this supposedly central life experience. To understand the breakdown of marriage as a grand loss is to say that those who were never offered a place within the marriage plot in the first place were never truly whole.

But Kitamura knows what she’s doing better than these themes might suggest. She chooses to engage the themes in A Separation precisely because they are at the heart of the idea of the literary novel; she approaches them with full knowledge of both their weight and their diminishing relevance. The narrator understands herself to be in a story about the end of a marriage, and situates herself consciously within the well-mannered navel-gazing interiority of the twentieth century novel.