You Will Learn to Love Me

The painful end to a dormant marriage built on deluded expectations is the subject of Chace's sparely written, quietly powerful second novel (after Intimacy). Narrator Kate Willoughby contrasts the distaste she feels for her manipulative, dictatorial husband with the obsessive love she lavishes on their young daughter, Eliza. Hank Willoughby is a banker; Kate writes PR for a brokerage firm, and her language is as measured as economic bulletins. Running counterpoint to Kate's decision to end the marriage is the death of the mother of one of Eliza's kindergarten classmates, and its effect on Eliza as she dimly understands the finality of that separation and tries to deny her parents' imminent disunion. One does not wonder at Kate's determination to rid herself of the mean-mouthed man who was well aware she didn't love him when they married, especially when Hank admits to a bizarre risk he took in marrying her. Chace herself takes the risk of making her protagonist difficult to warm to: Kate is emotionally repressed, severely self-contained, even surly; she refers to herself as ``a blank,'' doesn't communicate with Hank but shares intimate details with virtual strangers. As she comes to terms with loss, however, Kate achieves self-knowledge and wholeness-``in separation begins the individual''-and the elegiac ending proves surprisingly affecting. (Jan.)