Raymond and Hannah

Meghan Daum

This is a slim novel, constructed on so small a scale that it occasionally comes close to suffocating from the postmodern fragmentation that is its chief stylistic conceit. Marche, who's only 29 years old, tends not to write fully rendered scenes, and instead lists the key players and events as if dictating notes to himself. But his minimalism is one of form, not content. The language he uses is so dazzling, so unsentimental, that the bones of the story become almost irrelevant. Besides, Marche isn't interested in telling an epic story. He's trying to sort through a series of contradictory moments over nine months in the lives of two people who, if they ''were a cocktail . . . would be two parts absence, one part presence.'' In so doing, he has produced a work that is both beautiful and confusing. In other words, an honest love story.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In his startling debut, Marche offers up a rare hybrid: the page-turner prose poem. Raymond and Hannah meet at a party in Toronto, and what might have been a one-night stand blossoms into something more enduring. In lyrical paragraphs labeled in the margins (e.g., "Lost virginities"), Marche maps out their five-day love affair with bursts of confession, philosophical musing and notes on the infinitesimal shifts of mood between kisses. On Raymond and Hannah's second day together, "The afternoon is a labyrinthine flex of joints twisted around each other in a variety of blisses." But at the end of the week, Hannah leaves Canada and her WASPy lover for a previously scheduled nine-month stay in Jerusalem. Their e-mail exchanges about their respective cities and pursuits-Raymond is writing a doctoral dissertation on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy while Hannah studies Torah at an Orthodox yeshiva-don't necessarily forward the plot, but rather reveal how little two people can really tell each other. In between their letters, the novel offers utterly convincing glimpses of both characters' lives. Especially full-bodied is the evocation of Hannah's struggle to understand her Jewish identity, not just through study but through the city of Jerusalem itself. In this lushly romantic book, love between Jew and atheist gentile resembles the divided city, simultaneously impossible and actual. Agent, Jacqueline Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto). (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

One-night stand of a mid-20s Toronto couple stretches into travel to Jerusalem, in a brief first novel, self-conscious and finally compromised hopelessly by its own editorial apparatus-with actual author's notes in the margin. Most solid about this tender love story is its charming detail as it switches back and forth in point of view. Raymond, a doctoral candidate in English literature, fresh from a broken love affair, meets Hannah at a party and goes with her to her attic apartment. The date extends into a week's glut of sex ("After the initial stages of an affair, it becomes necessary to widen the range of sexual positions," as the author notes). Then Hannah must fly to Jerusalem for a nine-month stay to explore her Jewish identity while learning Torah at an Orthodox institute. The two correspond lustily via e-mail, until Raymond discloses after many months that he has fallen into another affair with a 19-year-old Asian violinist. By this time, however, he already has tickets to visit Hannah, and, when he arrives, their romance blossoms happily at the Western Wall-again, just at the countdown to a departure for Hannah. Can there be true love here, even if Raymond isn't Jewish and even if the couple does return to Toronto for good? Canadian newcomer Marche is a witty writer, and the narrative becomes a parody of many styles-journalistic, academic (the sections on doctoral subject Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy show scholarly depth) and biblical, all underscored by the mock-ponderous comments in the margins, such as "Raymond considers the silence" or "Toronto aubade." But the swath of e-mail correspondence between Hannah and Raymond is simply tedious. Further, the couple isseparated during the middle section of an otherwise slender narrative, rupturing the sexy fluidity of the beginning. Still, the writing is jaunty and stylistically nimble. A touching narrative, frustratingly at arm's length.