This Is Between Us
This well-written but often frustrating novel chronicles five years in a relationship between an unnamed narrator and his unnamed lover, who are hipsters living in Oregon. Each has a child from a previous relationship. Each works, vaguely and unseriously. And each has a rich history of past lovers who pop into the present tense with regularity (the narrator makes out with an old girlfriend in a bar and semi-stalks others by driving past their houses). The gossamer-thin plot charts the ebb and flow of love, but this is no conventional narrative. Instead, Sampsell frames his book as one long address by the narrator to his lover—one consisting of telling moments and epiphanies rendered in precise, poetic prose, more like a journal or memoir than a novel. In between these, the book ranges from the banally familiar (the egocentric fascination of romantic love, the pangs of disintegration) to the willfully perverse, particularly sexual memories and fantasies both absurd and disturbing (but not particularly erotic). This sad sack of a narrator overshares in the extreme, no doubt in the pursuit of some kind of honesty, but emerges as too thoughtless and even amoral for his musings on love to have much resonance. (Nov.)