The Scenic Route


“The Scenic Route is a witty and poignant, and also an extremely interesting and acute, novel. Ms. Kirshenbaum mines a very rich seam that’s entirely her own. This is
first-rate writing by a novelist who gracefully defies
classification.”
..................................................................—Richard Ford

From The Washington Post:

“I can't imagine what Kirshenbaum told people who asked, "So, what's your novel about?" and yet it's continually engaging, the illusion of artlessness that only the disciplined artist can carry off.”

“[The Scenic Route] looks like another year in Provence or another romance baked under the Tuscan sun. It begins with a recession fantasy: A middle-age, divorced woman gets laid off but uses her severance money for a trip to Italy. There, as usually happens, she strikes up a conversation with [Henry] a handsome millionaire at a cafe and spends the rest of the summer driving around Europe with him.

But in this case, the opening is something of a bait-and-switch, and the switch is far better than the bait. Sylvia Landsman's tour of Europe turns out to be just a thin frame on which Kirshenbaum hangs several generations of family stories. Florence, Prague and Slovenia whiz by as they take "the scenic route . . . loop-de-loop and fast, as if we were in hot pursuit of a horsefly."...[Sylvia’s] quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic stories flow one after another, anecdotes nested in anecdotes, interrupted by asides and parenthetical observations, and punctuated by historical footnotes....We hear of the neighbor girl who accidentally decapitates her own mother, the uncle whose hands wander too far. . . . a lightning storm in Austria reminds Sylvia of Great Aunt Hannah getting [electro-] shock treatment in New York, which sparks the tale of Luigi Galvani in 18th-century Bologna discovering the electrical nature of frogs' nerves .... delivered in prose that mimics all the detours and incongruities of the spoken word. Much of what Sylvia describes involves herself: the quiet dissolution of her passionless marriage, her dangerous neglect of a close friend. But other stories, drawn from the sepia past, sound more like fables. There's the great-grandfather....who left home, "someplace like Fiddler-on-the-Roofville, Poland, with a handful of zlotys in his pocket...." Aunt Thea dropped out of Vassar during the Depression to marry the son of a wealthy family that kept their lives stagnating for decades. Sylvia's namesake, Aunt Semille, escaped the Holocaust and came to New York with stories meant to obliterate the past rather than preserve it. But that, too, is all part of this thoughtful meditation on the way we construct our lives. Sylvia reminds us that storytellers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. "More often than not," she admits, "we don't know what really happened, and what we say happened is more likely to be a reconstruction of events rather than a restoration. We imagine as much as we remember." Early in their road trip, Sylvia asks Henry somewhat defensively, "Does there have to be a point to a story?" . . . there doesn't have to be a point, but that doesn't mean a story is pointless. . . . and that's a theme this novel returns to in a variety of thoughtful ways. Kirshenbaum has endowed her narrator with the raconteur's greatest gift, that sense of imminent revelation that keeps us from wondering, "Are we there yet?" Spiked with wit, scrubbed free of sentimentality, these tales of love and loss, courage and cowardice, transport us back into the pages of our own lives and our own families.

More Praise for The Scenic Route

“Miraculously, Kirshenbaum avoids sentimentality. From the start, there is little room for a happy resolution. The slim hope....makes it less fun and more tragic.”
—Los Angeles Times

“...Kirshenbaum offers a refreshingly gimlet-eyed examination of memory, one that cuts through the gauzy layers imposed by time.”
—Time Out New York

On The Hunt For Fabulous Fiction: “[The Scenic Route is].... bitterly funny and intelligently pieced together....
—National Public Radio Critic's Lists: Summer 2009

“.... Binnie Kirshenbaum’s clever, offbeat novel The Scenic Route is an antidote to all that soft-focus sentiment. This is indeed a woman-has-midlife-crisis-and-finds-romance-in-Italy story, but it is so resolutely unsentimental, even antisentimental, that you won’t be dialing Alitalia anytime soon. Instead of escapist fantasy, narrator Sylvia Landsman offers a reality check, sobering truths about family, regret, loss, history—in fact, she provides commentary on all kinds of subjects..... Just about the only thing she doesn’t serve up is a happy ending.”
—The Daily Beast

“[A] moving, bittersweet novel."
—More Magazine

"Binnie Kirshenbaum's The Scenic Route (is) an idiosyncratic and totally winning "romance" in which sentiment and cynicism are poised in a most virtuoso performance."
—Joyce Carol Oates

"Binnie Kirshenbaum is a fearlessly unsentimental storyteller, a gifted comic writer, and a thoughtful archeologist of family life."
—Gary Shteyngart

"Caught between a desire to forget and a need to remember, Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Sylvia is a brilliant creation – a sharp, funny, mournful voice that you just want to keep listening to, whether the topic is love, death, Jewish Easter, camel hair coats or the history of Arthur Murray’s dance franchise. The Scenic Route is a wonderful book and the best kind of road novel, less concerned with points A, B, and C than with the drama of those driving, their lust, their grief, their self- (and self-shedding) discoveries."
—Sam Lipsyte

“It takes skill and assurance to pull off this beguiling narrative-by-digression, a love story-cum-family history-cum-confession of sins, and Kirshenbaum has both in plentiful supply…there are no happy endings here; instead, Kirshenbaum delivers capital-T truths.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Kirshenbaum’s distinctive voice transforms a lightly plotted novel into an enchanting, tangent-strewn meditation on memory, love and luck…the narrative is a meandering, slightly sorrowful account of two people in love, but not quite brave enough to come up with a plan for a shared future. Lovely prose and quirky observations carry Kirshenbaum’s seventh novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Sylvia is stand-up-comic hilarious, going off on uproarious tangents involving everything from Raisinettes to shampoo, assimilation, and Arthur Murray dance studios, and issuing zingers of startling precision. It’s good, droll fun, until pleasure gives way to denial, lies, and desperate measures, and the full implications of their pasts emerge. Not only are Sylvia and Henry fugitives from unloving parents and their own terrible mistakes, Sylvia also carries the indelible wounds of the Holocaust. Absurdly underrated Kirshenbaum is at her darkly comic and boldly encompassing best here, diverting us with hairpin-turn humor while slipping us hard truths about memory and inheritance, betrayal and guilt, and the inevitable end of the road.”
—Booklist Review