Looking at love as a fly on the suitcase

Binnie Kirshenbaum’s seventh book, “The Scenic Route,” has a slightly unusual form. It’s as if the narrator, Sylvia Landsman, has picked up the phone and is telling the story of her love affair to you, a dear friend. Novels aren’t usually written this way, like a running one-sided conversation. While tremendously readable, it is a bit challenging -- an almost perfect literary summer read.

Like a conversation, it starts forward and frequently cycles back; it’s even interrupted by occasional interjections. These appear in italics without explanation: They might be Sylvia’s thoughts or the response of her imagined listener; sometimes they appear to be spoken by someone else in the text -- say, her lover Henry.

Henry is dreamy. The floppy-haired American is sitting on a patio in Italy, where Sylvia, an unencumbered traveler, has just spilled coffee on her white dress. He offers her a handkerchief and, despite his anachronistic presence -- with his preppy looks and slightly old-fashioned manner, he could have tumbled out of a 1960s movie -- she’s immediately drawn to him.

Exactly how their romance blossoms is lost in a swirl: bits of conversation, a souvenir ashtray and suddenly it’s the next morning.

We already know Sylvia: The Manhattanite in her early 40s has just lost her job. She’s financially secure enough to go to Italy to fill the void but middle-class enough to need to work again when she gets home. She has a tiny apartment. She collects things.

Henry and Sylvia decide to spend some time together before Henry finds out that Sylvia is peacefully, amicably divorced. And Sylvia finds out that Henry is unhappily, irrevocably married.

He’s kept by a wealthy Brit in a partnership that’s mutually beneficial: She has a top-notch husband, he has a bottomless bank account. When she calls, at the end of the summer, it’s his job to come.

Until then, he’s free. He puts Sylvia’s heavy suitcases in his car and they head off to a random European destination. And another and another. As they travel, Sylvia tells stories: of her crazy friend Ruby, her parents, her strait-laced brother, her childhood in New York.

“[A]lone, the two of us, in a world of our own design, a world not unlike the desktop biosphere you can buy at Sharper Image. Or a snow dome. Other people? Who were they to us? Other people, they were the stuff of stories to tell; they were the characters who populated our stories, the stories we told to each other, to entertain ourselves, to explain ourselves, to be. And how happy we were, Henry and I, telling stories, as if stories offered possibilities where there had been none.”

As much as this describes exactly what happens in the novel’s pages, it’s doing something else too. This is one way to understand a love affair, a sealed-off world-for-two that exists apart from outside concerns, where lovers bring themselves into a new kind of being for each other. Sylvia and Henry have just such a blithe romance, and that it happens while driving the Tuscan countryside, in luxury hotel beds, across marble-topped tables on balconies with stunning views might almost be too much to bear.

Miraculously, Kirshenbaum avoids sentimentality. Perhaps it’s because as the book wears on, Sylvia tells stories of increasing seriousness: Her friend Ruby’s hilarious quirks start to seem like miserably ill-advised gambles. Or perhaps it’s that, like the romantic films from another era -- 1967’s “Two for the Road” or 1978’s “Same Time, Next Year” -- it’s clear that the relationship, however true and deep, has its limits.

Sylvia lists souvenirs from their trip in an intermittent refrain: an amber ring, a pine cone, a necklace from Prague. She acquires these keepsakes as they drive in ellipses around Europe, and soon she’ll have gathered them all up. Once that happens, are the memories exhausted? Will there be no more stories of Henry?

The book opens with the lines, “Here is the story of Henry and me. I wish it had a different end. It had a good beginning.” From the start, there is little room for a happy resolution.

And if this is an imperfect summer read, this is partly why. Surely a summerlong affair can be satisfying -- it is mostly blissful for Sylvia and Henry, who fall genuinely in love. But the slim hope afforded them makes it less fun and more tragic. The reader knows from the start exactly how circumscribed their story will be.

This shifts some burden of drama onto Sylvia’s stories, the most important of which involves Ruby, the friend who is, at times, the imagined listener. But the Ruby story can’t bear the emotional weight imposed upon it, making the book feel strangely shallow at a critical moment. And when Sylvia tells, late in the novel, of her father losing all his memories -- when memories are what sustains her -- the contrast seems too easy and heavy-handed.

But perfection is overrated. Sylvia is as brittle as her beaded glass necklace. Henry comes when called. Theirs is an almost perfect summer romance, one that swings in spirals, trying to gain enough momentum to spin them out of the orbits they’ve committed to.

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carolyn.kellogg@latimes.com