Ordinary Love, Virago and Little Brown’s “lead literary fiction” for 2025, is a novel of two parts. In the strong opening half we’re given the separation of Jack and Emily.
They’ve been together for about 10 years, have two children and their dynamic is defined by a significant imbalance in their finances (he earns and she doesn’t). Cue fascinating, stomach-curdling depictions of everyday coercion, of love-bombing after rages and, on her part, a willed blindness that’s finally faltering.
While this account is obviously fictional, the unheimlich experience of self-doubt and doublethink required to endure and finally recognise the methods of a controlling partner is done so well, one isn’t surprised to read that Rutkoski has “drawn on her own experience of going through a divorce at 40 as a mother of two, and then entering a queer relationship”.
Initially, the second half of the book, which consists of this rekindling of the relationship between Emily and her first love from high school, Gen, is excellently done. It’s everything a romance novel (because no matter how many allusions to the Greeks and Harvard you put in, this is, like so much “literary fiction” marketed today, a good, old-fashioned romance novel) ought to be; thrilling, heart-wrenching and genuinely arousing. The sex scenes between Gen and Emily are gorgeously written, graphic without being seedy, detailed without the detail feeling gratuitous.
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Alas, as soon as this relationship starts to enter the Ross-and-Rachel-esque second and third rounds of well-intentioned misunderstandings and innocent untruths, one’s patience grows thin. I get the impression, from the somewhat cliched meta-narrative in the book, in which Emily’s new agent tells her that her book’s ending needs to be padded out, that perhaps there was pressure on Rutkoski to do the same. If so, they’ve done her a disservice.
The protracted romantic tension is irritating rather than exciting. Also, unfortunately, the cast of spunky, ever-understanding friends that pop up here and there are almost too annoying to be borne, and one senses through them Rutkoski’s history as a writer of YA and children’s fiction. Even so, many readers are desperately seeking accounts of spunky friends and the vicarious comfort of lovers’ turmoil, and this novel will no doubt be adored by them.
