Breakup: The End of a Love Story

When Joel Rose left his wife, Catherine Texier, and the East Village to move in uptown with an editor at Crown Books--which had just paid him $105,000 for his new novel--their acrimonious split was the talk of literary New York. Reading Texier's present-tense account of their final months together is like watching a train wreck in progress. Emotions are volatile, behavior is bad, each nasty skirmish in the marital war is reported in excruciating detail apparently unmitigated by editing. She plunges readers into the thick of things with pungent prose that displays, despite the fact that she's French-born, her impressive grasp of Anglo-Saxon expletives--though idiosyncratic words such as "competitivity" give the text a faintly foreign flavor. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband, once a champion of alternative literature, comes across as a climber who wants mainstream success and big bucks as much as he wants to end the marriage--indeed, his reluctance to actually pack up and move out suggests that what he'd really like is to have his cake and eat it too. Yet the narrative also provides ample support for Rose's contention that his wife is emotionally needy and self-centered. (She notes, but never really grapples with, the impact of their vicious quarreling on their two daughters.) Do we need the graphic particulars of the couple's sex life, still "hot" even as their relationship lurches toward auto-destruct? Probably not, but Texier's willingness to tell all certainly makes this an engrossing example of the memoir-as-reprisal. --Wendy Smith