A SEPARATE PLACE

A sad chronicle of a failing marriage by a writer who finds hope and healing in nature and religion.

Brill (As Far as the Eye Can See, not reviewed) acknowledges at the outset that his family—wife, two pre-teen daughters—has become “a casualty of divorce.” Writing from east Tennessee in a remote cabin (his loving and sometimes amusing accounts of its construction consume much of the text), he says that he “needed to depart the temporal world for a time to delve deep into the world of spirit.” And so he took a six-months leave from his position as director of communications for a research center at the University of Tennessee and headed for the woods to write. Divided into seven sections, his memoir moves languidly through his courtship of his wife, the birth of children, the alterations of aspirations and careers, the trials and joys of parenthood, and many wrenching introspections (most of them wondering why he and his wife can’t find a way to reconcile). Enriching the story are periodic flashbacks to his hike of the entire Appalachian Trail, an ascent of Mt. Rainier, and various other stressful experiences (his father’s cancer, an elderly friend’s physical decline). At the center, however, stands the cabin, whose construction forms an ironic contrast to the destruction of his personal life. Brill’s fiery love for his two young daughters glows on nearly every page, but (although he claims to present an even-handed description of his divorce) he portrays his wife as a physical beauty who lacks his intellect and whose interests, counterpoised to his, seem superficial. (One evening they sat reading; his book was Walden, while she was “halfway through The Day Diana Died.”) The causes of the dissolution are vague—he can offer as reasons only “hurtful utterances, acts of neglect, and unfulfilled expectations.”

A flat account whose final aspiration (“[L]et the Holy Spirit fill the empty vessel”) falls as heavily across the page as an unanswered prayer.