Love Is a Canoe: Summary and book reviews of Love Is a Canoe by Ben Schrank, plus links to an excerpt from Love Is a Canoe and a biography of Ben Schrank.
Love Is a Canoe
by Ben Schrank
Hardcover: Jan 2013,
352 pages.
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his decades-old book on love and relationships, has won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike. Peter and his wife lived a peaceful life, but now it's 2010, and his wife has just died. He passes time with a woman he admires but doesn't love - and he begins to question the advice he's famously doled out for decades.
Then he receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor who wants to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Marriage Is a Canoe with a contest for struggling couples. The prize? An afternoon with Peter and a chance to save their relationship.
The contest ensnares Stella in the opaque politics of her publishing house, while it introduces the reader to couples in varied states of distress: a shy thirtysomething Brooklynite whose husband may be just a bit too charismatic for his own good; a middle-aged publisher whose imposing manner has imposed loneliness on her for longer than she cares to admit. Then there's Peter, who must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe if he is going to help the contest's winners and find a way to love again.
In Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank delivers a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of marriage and the difficulty of repairing the damage when well-intentioned people forget how to be good to one another.
There have been times in protagonist Peter Herman's life that he wishes he had never written the book that made him famous. Marriage Is a Canoe, his self-help manual – masquerading as a memoir of the summer he spent with his grandparents when he was thirteen – certainly helped him earn the kind of comfortable life he continues to lead forty years after its original publication. But he's now more often embarrassed than flattered by strangers' accolades and admiration; four decades of living, not to mention his own long but imperfect marriage, have led him to believe that his words on marriage written as a young man were more naïve than sage. (Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
The New York Times Book Review
Schrank has done something here that may sound impossible: He’s written a funny novel about publishing that is not caustic but optimistic, not biting but bighearted—a story about the delusions with which self-aware, smart people are all too willing to live in order to avoid the painful (yet entertaining) upheaval that comes with truth.
The Boston Globe
What results when Emily and her self-satisfied husband turn up at Herman’s lakeside cabin is expertly wrought farce—Schrank skewers the publishing industry and modern relationship talk, while somehow still making us care about the fate of this wounded young marriage. His portrayal of present-day Brooklyn, with its artisanal businesses and self-conscious foodways, may someday feel as nostalgic as Herman’s sepia-tinged memories of paddling a canoe with the ever-wise Pop.
Vogue
A crackling sendup of book-marketing schemes and an inquiry into twenty-first-century togetherness.
People
Peter Herman’s marriage manual is a classic, but what does he really know about love? Whip-smart and highly entertaining.
Kirkus Reviews
A wise imagining of modern-day love, unromantic but never cynical.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The honesty doled out as events unspool is bracing and frank, and give these characters added depth and wisdom.
A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven and This Book Will Save Your Life Love Is a Canoe captures the most essential difficulties of marriage and commitment—our fears of love and loss. A brilliant book of do-overs and second chances, Schrank’s novel is mordantly funny and an all-too-real meditation on modern life.
Daniel Handler, author of Why We Broke Up
“Love Is a Canoe takes a good look at the world of self-help and both mocks and embraces our dearest and corniest desires. Ben Schrank’s terrific new novel is a real self-help book, and you should help yourself to it.
Laura Lippman, author of And When She Was Good and The Most Dangerous Thing
Funny, tender, wholly original—it’s as if all the good fairies came to its christening (story, dialogue, character, heart). I loved it.
Pick Your Favorite Best Selling Self-Help Book Quote
Each chapter of Peter Herman's fictional self-help book, Marriage Is a Canoe, ends with an aphorism such as "Compromise keeps your canoe steady. Compromise and you'll never go in circles."
Publications categorized as self-help or personal development books have been among the very best-selling books for decades. Here are some quotes from some of the best-selling self-help books of all time – which would you rely on to chart the course of your life?
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (originally published in 1937): "You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be."
Female Intelligence is a hilarious look at our inability to bridge the communication gap between men and women, despite all the Mars/Venus books on the market.
These are 2 of the 5 readalike suggestions for Love Is a Canoe. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
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(910 words).
Publishers Weekly
A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven and This Book Will Save Your Life
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (originally published in 1937): "You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be."
