Love Is a Canoe (Schrank) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Despite a softly cynical underside, Love Is a Canoe is an affirmation that secrets, fantasies and wrong turns are part of both publishing careers and love. Schrank has done something here that may sound impossible: He’s written a funny novel about publishing that is not caustic but optimistic, not biting but bighearted—a story about the delusions with which self-aware, smart people are all too willing to live in order to avoid the painful (yet entertaining) upheaval that comes with truth.
Dean Bakopoulos - New York Times Book Review


(Starred review.) Three stories of personal and literary authenticity weave through this novel of love and books that gets sharper and smarter as it progresses. Forty years ago, Peter Herman penned Love Is a Canoe, a memoir and meditation on marriage that retains a devoted following. Canoe’s homilies from Peter’s adolescent summer spent in upstate New York with his grandparents as his own parents’ marriage crumbled contain a certain enduring quality: “A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a couple of kids.” But as the recently widowed author ponders the course of his marriage and current relationship, straining against late-middle age, there’s a danger that his personal and literary fictions will unravel. The danger grows acute when Stella, a young book editor trying to spur sales on Canoe’s 40th anniversary, creates a contest for a couple in trouble; winners will spend an afternoon with the somewhat reclusive author in the hopes that their troubled relationship will be rescued. But as Emily and Eli Corelli, a young Brooklyn couple with a rocky marriage, enter Peter’s orbit, they, Peter, and Stella confront the underlying truths of their lives. The honesty doled out as events unspool is bracing and frank, and give these characters added depth and wisdom.
Publishers Weekly


The revival of a classic self-help book reveals some raw emotions in this canny novel by Schrank (Consent, 2002, etc.). Published in 1971, Peter Herman's Marriage Is a Canoe became the kind of '70s self-help book that everybody seemed to own yet nobody seemed to take seriously.... [I]n 2011, it's inspired Stella, a young editor at the book's publisher, to find a way to boost sales: A contest in which a couple with marriage troubles wins a weekend with Peter to talk out their issues.... Schrank has firm command of the story, never letting the plot turns descend into farce, and the closing pages are a convincing portrait of how relationships shift in ways no self-help book can anticipate. A wise imagining of modern-day love, unromantic but never cynical.
Kirkus Reviews