Leaving by Roxana Robinson is a novel about a marriage and the habituated assumptions made by its long term, well-off partners, Warren and Janet. When Warren falls in love with a woman who had once, many years before, rejected him, he feels an unrestrained passion that, this second time around, is answered in kind. Sarah has been long divorced and lives alone in a grand house with a dog as her only companion, whereas Warren is shackled in what,for him, is a dead-end marriage that he assumes Janet, his wife, might similarly like to be released from.

When he broaches the subject however, he discovers that his assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. Janet is undone and in her grief-stricken state confides in their only child, a daughter named Katrina. Kat goes to battle for her mother, letting her father know that if he sues for divorce he will be divorced from her as well.

The characters in Leaving are refreshingly unpredictable. For example, on the night of Warren’s revelation, he exiles himself to their daughter’s childhood room, and deep in the night, Janet tiptoes in and asks if she can get in bed with him. “He raises the bedclothes as he used to do for the children when they had nightmares,” and when he perceives that Janet is sobbing softly, “he tightens his arms around her, comforting her for what he’s done” (128). It is a tender, supremely human moment, the wronged woman going to her adulterous husband for solace.

Warren and Janet feel contradictory emotions, and as the example shows, they have the ability to forgive, which will figure more largely later in the novel. But what gives the narrative its heft and power is Kat, the warrior daughter. It is only through flashbacks that we see the soft, loving side of her because once the issue of separation is raised, she turns to rock. That obstructive force becomes the engine that powers the narrative in the novel’s second half.

Watching the effects of this unchanging, obstructive force on Warren, I was reminded of our present political moment where figures on our home stage and around the world refuse to concede or compromise, and even in the face of compelling evidence that would make anyone else revise their agenda, remain unmoved.

Warren is an opera buff. When the novel begins, he has just met Sarah at a performance of "Tosca" at Lincoln Center. The plot of that famous tragedy shadows the novel in ways I’m not knowledgeable enough to talk about, so I will simply mention it and say that the emotional tangles that Kat’s rage creates feel operatic. Everything Warren says feeds it. The first time she confronts her father, who is a successful architect and, as the head of his own firm, a man used to being in control, he is stunned:

“What he’s doing is simple. He’s stated his intentions. People can state their responses, but they can’t alter his position. Yet nothing is moving. The opposition is immense, a mountain of stone. He has to get through it to reach the other side, the rest of his life” (142).

Kat is the mountain. And even though the things she tells her father have a touch of the absurd, as in, “If you divorce Mom, I’ll divorce you” (146) there is no humor.

It was exciting to watch a character I recognized as someone I could be friends with—that is, someone who is lively, invested and involved in life, and basically a good person, encounter these obstacles. The force that creates that excitement is a character who does not feel entirely human. Warren, Janet, and Warren’s lover, Sarah, are realistic characters a reader can empathize with because their struggles and confusion feel familiar. They are what E.M. Forster, in his foundational text, Aspects of the Novel, calls round characters; that is, they have such depth and complexity they do things that surprise us. Kat is a flat character because she lacks that depth; she is unable to change. This is not a criticism; most novels have a few flat characters because they serve an important purpose. In this one, Kat is the force that drives the narrative. It is her contrary position that rules; she slips around in the background of Warren’s life, shadowing everything he thinks and does.

In Leaving I see the momentum a flat character can bring to a narrative. Though she doesn’t physically appear in many scenes, her power saturates more than half the pages, influencing how the other characters think and feel and act.

Robinson, Roxana, Leaving. New York: Norton, 2024.

Filed under: Using a flat character to add momentum to a narrative