cover image Fighting Gravity

Fighting Gravity

Peggy Rambach. Steerforth Press, $19 (150pp) ISBN 978-1-58642-023-9

Peggy Rambach's powerful second novel, Fighting Gravity (after When the Animals Leave), is based on her marriage to novelist Andre Dubus. At 19, Ellie Rifkin meets and falls in love with volatile 41-year-old Gerard Babineau, a hard-drinking writer recently separated from his second wife. The narrative alternates between their whirlwind romance and the trauma of a car accident years later that leaves Babineau in a wheelchair. Ellie at times seems like a ghost hovering just outside the story, trying to make sense of her love for the intense, often cruel man who has consumed her life. ( Apr. 7)