Review: Pivot and Slip by Lilah Suzanne
Pivot and Slip by Lilah Suzanne (August 12, 2015); 174 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
Although I’ve heard the stories of famous boxers and football players studying ballet in order to improve their nimbleness, there seems no more star-crossed a pair of lovers than Jack Douglas and Felix Montero. While Felix is a boxer, Jack is a former-Olympic-hopeful-swimmer-turned-yoga-instructor. It sounds like a recipe for a sit-com, but this novel is anything but. Instead, it’s a story about kindness, about hurt and healing and how we help each other toward a good place. After a disastrously-humiliating experience in his swimming career, Jack’s gone yoga; Felix was critically injured as a boxer (so much so that boxing again could kill him) and is, perhaps mistakenly, enrolled in jack’s yoga class for seniors.
The two, as different as they may be, are both healing from the most painful loss: one day you’re headed surely down a path, and then the path is, without warning, and in the most painful and public way possible, irrevocably blocked. Though Felix appears to be the one suffering the most when he angrily storms out of Jack’s yoga class, and though Jack takes on the project of helping Felix heal and move on from his loss, it turns out that Felix helps Jack find his way back to what he loves, too.
It’s a novel about healing, and how we can help each other do that, and how even the most put-together people probably need to heal from something. It’s a novel about letting go of the past, the dead parts of ourselves that only weigh us down, and unearthing those parts that were prematurely buried but might still give us life, and how to tell the difference. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s a novel that declares that we don’t have to do that alone (there are so many people that want to help Jack, for instance—aside from Felix, there’s his roommate and his class of yenta-ish elderly yoga students). This is a story about falling in love with another person, but it’s also about how to love yourself, and how to let yourself be loved by other people (lovers and friends and community). Allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to be cared for by others is, perhaps, the hardest thing of all, and the mountain that these two characters try to climb.
Well gosh this is the most lovely surprise! Thank you so much!
