Cover Page

Praise for Subtraction

“There isn’t a writer working today who sees the world, or hears it, or inhabits it more fearlessly than Mary Robison. Reading Subtraction is falling in love with her—her voice, her verbs, the peculiar squinted view she has. This is the book we all wanted to write. It’s as smart as snakes. It’s a work of generosity and genius, of perfect timing and pitch, of immense sadness, and singular, driving hope. I can scarcely imagine anyone writing a novel half as stunning anytime soon.”

—FREDERICK BARTHELME,

author of There Must Be Some Mistake

“Robison raises sitcom wit to the level of real emotional situations, real comedy and real art with much the same perspicacity as Henry James did a century ago in ‘The Reverberator,’ his romantic satire on American media madness and the first novel to isolate the wisecrack or one-liner as the basic unit of American courtship conversation. But where James’ use of the wisecrack satirized his innocents abroad in the 1880s, Robison makes the one-liner emblematic of her characters’ ’90s hipness at home against a background of baffled emotional and intellectual drift.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Subtraction stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form—taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected . . . In Subtraction Mary Robison creates a poignant, forceful tale of lovers in limbo. Her writing is rich with detail, lean with implication. When the tedium, the drudgery, the ephemera are sifted out, we’re left with the intense. Each word pulls its weight. Nothing is wasted.”

—The Millions

SUBTRACTION

Also by Mary Robison

ALSO BY MARY ROBISON

An Amateur’s Guide to the Night

Believe Them

Days

One D.O.A., One on the Way

Oh!

Tell Me

Why Did I Ever

Title Page

Copyright

SUBTRACTION

Copyright © 1991 by Mary Robison

First published by Alfred A Knopf, Inc. in 1991

First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2018

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robison, Mary, author.

Title: Subtraction : a novel / Mary Robison.

Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010548 | ISBN 9781640090859 | eISBN 9781640090866

Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 S8 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

Cover design by Jenny Carrow

Book design by Jordan Koluch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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Dedication

For Bobbie Bristol

and, with love,

for Rachel and Jen

Coco Plumoso