Claire Lombardo’s ‘Same As It Ever Was’ delves into a longtime marriage

In “Same As It Ever Was,” novelist Claire Lombardo explores the restlessness, silences, and comforts that mark one woman’s decades-long relationship. 

There’s nothing minimalist or lightweight about Claire Lombardo’s novels. Like her engrossing 2019 debut, “The Most Fun We Ever Had,” her latest, “Same As It Ever Was,” is a capacious, tender family drama and ode to marriage set in the Chicago area from which she hails. 

Once again, Lombardo zeroes in on the vicissitudes of a supportive and loving, but by no means perfect, multidecades union. Her focus this time is less on sibling relationships and more on how her characters are marked by their childhoods, and how the baggage they carry affects their relationships with their spouses and children.

Julia Marini Ames is the frequently shaky centerpost of the novel. She is a wife, mother of two, and soon-to-be grandmother who has spent her life trying to make up for a childhood “characterized primarily by distance and need.” After her father disappeared when she was 7 years old, she was raised by her erratic single mother, who made her feel unloved. For reasons revealed late in the novel, her home life deteriorated significantly in her teens, leading her to pick a distant college, never to return.  

By her own reckoning, Julia often feels inadequate and not “an especially happy person, generally.” She regrets that her default mode is negativity, and rues her proclivity for ruining things and “hurting the people who cared for her.”

But most of the time, Julia recognizes that one of the best things that ever happened to her was meeting her husband, Mark Ames. She was 30 when the tall, affable stranger came to her rescue on a Chicago street, proffering coins for her parking meter and inviting himself to crash her weekly solo Korean dinner. 

Lombardo depicts this “person who’d always moved easily through the world” with descriptions that provide a sharp contrast to Julia: “the nicest man in the world,” a “humble nerd,” “a carer,” an “empath.” Even so, Julia nearly destroys their marriage with several self-sabotaging moves – which I’ll leave for readers to discover.

We meet Julia, who’s in her late 50s, grocery shopping for her husband’s 60th birthday dinner. She’s shaken when she runs into an old friend, Helen Russo, now in her 80s, whom she’d hoped never to see again. Our interest is immediately piqued, wondering what happened between these two women more than 18 years earlier to cause such a rift.

Lombardo is a great fan of flashbacks; her preferred narrative ploy is to dangle hints of past upsets, which are gradually revealed by jumping back in time. While this builds suspense, it also leads to frequent repetitions. By the time the novel returns to Julia’s school years, we’ve already got the basic gist (excepting one particularly dark revelation). 

Repetition – along with excessive detail – also bloated Lombardo’s hefty first novel. “Same As It Ever Was” is another 500-pager that would be stronger if it were significantly shorter.

That said, Lombardo is a writer who lavishes attention on her characters. 

She excels at capturing not just the intricacies of marital interactions that include stony stretches, but also how living with a disdainful, brooding, “mean and gorgeous” teenager gearing up for college can put an entire household on edge.  

Lombardo’s portrait of the acute loneliness of new motherhood and “the deadly ennui of the day-in-day-out” is particularly sharp. 

It’s at this low point that 30-something Julia, killing time on an especially rough day by visiting the botanical gardens with her 3-year-old son, meets Helen, a docent. 

The compassionate older woman, a retired lawyer and mother of five grown sons, takes teary Julia under her wing, and their friendship flourishes over the course of several months with the intensity of a love affair. 

“You know you’re allowed to be having a hard time, right?” Helen asks Julia, who has expressed guilt for complaining about “the easiest life in the world.”

“Same As It Ever Was” is a fine-grained portrait of a woman determined to learn how to be a mother, wife, daughter – and person. It builds to a moving climax, encompassing along the way unexpected weddings, funerals, reconciliations, and losses. 

Like life itself.