Ruin by Leigh Seippel
Character and chance braid vividly throughout Ruin (City Point Press), a tale by Leigh Seippel of a couple’s shattered glittering life. Young Frank and Francy had every settled marriage’s nightmare of sudden total loss of basic viability.
But they wake into that nightmare, which becomes reality for them. Completely bankrupted by legal liability in a bitter large financial scandal, they have just fled from polished Manhattan to a collapsed farm in the remote northern Hudson Valley. And they are discovering chasms of silent emotion cracked beneath their habitual ease together.
Because their catastrophe of sudden poverty is due to Frank’s misjudgment. A disillusioned Ph.D. literature program dropout, he naively allowed his heiress wife to guarantee debt of his college friends’ new investment firm — which exploded hopelessly insolvent amid unsavory foreign scandals. Now unemployable and wracked with guilt over his failure to protect his beloved wife of six years, Frank humbly undertakes manual labor creating an unusual artisanal brewery on a shoestring. And, urged by a doctor neighbor perceiving his perhaps suicidal distress, Frank as prescribed takes up fly fishing on a challenging self-taught basis.
TOLD THROUGH THE EYES OF FRANK
Much of the swiftly arcing Ruin is told through the evolving narrational perceptions of Frank. He becomes acutely observational astream as must a fine fisherman. And becomes also intently watchful of his beset wife now of obvious interest to a local wealthy but shadowy leader of a flyfishing club Frank aspires to join. The fast-flowing river nicknamed by fishers Rubicon and the club’s fast-flowing relationships all severely challenge Frank’s character as he turns outward toward a new way of living.
But disaster has driven the formerly light-spirited Francy inward. A childless orphan raised amid moderate wealth, she just dabbled at painting despite her elite art education. From such an easy life she stands facing poverty in rural isolation. Yet Francy, like Frank, also has it in her to draw upon feral energy.
She barriers her ambitious painting from Frank, without quarrel between them. Spends her days silently painting and reading complex novels in the chill studio room that Frank calls her North Pole. Francy’s work, which he spies upon uneasily, is colorfully but mordantly intense, enigmatically astonishing.
Which attracts attention from the wealthy back in Manhattan. And, ultimately, attention from an unforgettable murder investigator.
OBSERVANT AND IRONICALLY HUMOROUS TONE
Ruin spirals forward intriguingly, its ultimate geographic and event scope ranges far. But this novel’s special magic resides in the observant and ironically humorous tone of Frank the narrator. A sensitive well-intentioned man of still only 33 who is humble in his guilt. But as a robust athlete struggles with masculine anger in his humiliations of poverty.
Frank’s ways of encountering wilderness mysteries are fresh as they are piercing. In this, he is haunted by involuntary recall of passages from his now-useless literary education — snippets recalled that twist knives of dark irony.
So Frank and Francy crossed their Rubicon River. And now, in the light shone from their respective characters, are beginning to fish it as chance for new life.
This engrossing novel’s women and men, its farm and wild animals, its harsh rocky river and dark northern forest, continue alive long after Ruin’s last page is turned.
About Leigh Seippel:
Author Leigh Seippel lives in the worlds of Francy and Frank. He has worked a small farm in the Hudson Valley, complete with officious goat herd. Fly fishing has taken him across four continents. He is a past president of The Anglers’ Club of New York, where he now heads its fishery conservation activities.
