22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

Merkin’s ambitious and erotic tale (after her memoir This Close to Happy) looks back on 1990s New York City to chronicle an obsessive, torturous love affair between Judith Stone, a young book editor, and criminal defense attorney Howard Rose, 13 years her senior. In Judith’s third week of mourning the death of her psychiatrist, whom she was in love with, Judith meets Howard at a party and is immediately drawn to him. They embark on an intense sadomasochistic relationship, which Judith initially resists, then allows Howard to push her boundaries. Judith remains captive to Howard’s “allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice and always on the verge of melting away,” and Merkin includes copious, repetitive descriptions of their sexual encounters. Merkin captures Judith’s distinct perspective as a single woman working and dating in the early ’90s from two levels of remove: first, in a prologue with Judith’s narration a decade later and then in a series of authorial “Digressions” (“Peekaboo, I see you, out there in the world, holding this book”), in which Merkin muses on the nature of women’s submission and desire, and the viability of writing a novel. While inventive, these interruptions fail to achieve a new formal approach and shed too little light on the depth of Judith and Howard’s relationship. Merkin’s tale has its moments but falls short of her better work. (July)