'The Leave-Takers' review: Stellar story of star-crossed lovers

Romeo and Juliet had it easy compared with Jacob and Laynie, the contemporary lovers who thrash their way through early marriage in Steven Wingate's absorbing novel "The Leave-Takers."

Jacob, a sculptor and jack of many trades from Boston, grieves and rages over his parents' murder-suicide, which happened when he was 14, and the subsequent heroin overdose death of his only sibling. He has created an online forum for survivors of familial murder-suicide, which is every bit as dangerous as it is cathartic.

Laynie, a Californian, is locked in sorrow over the death of her mother when she was a child and the recent deaths of her beloved father and her pre-Jacob fiance, as well as multiple miscarriages. She travels the country in a vehicle full of her father's mementos, ritually dropping them off here and there in a futile effort to shed her sadness.

The two meet in Los Angeles, but their demons pull them apart. They meet again in South Dakota, where, despite grave doubts and worsened neuroses, they marry and settle down in the rural home Jacob inherited from an aunt and uncle. The unforgiving terrain is an apt backdrop for their struggles.

Very soon, almost everything goes wrong. As if obsession with death and the ghosts it breeds aren't enough, both are prone to dayslong binges on pilfered prescription pills. They are dangerously close to taking leave of their troubled lives, of exiting what Jacob calls "The Void" of sorrowful, meaningless existence for the greatest void of all, death.

And yet, this is overwhelmingly a love story, and a surprisingly sweet one

.The book's final chapter is a bit much, jumping into the future to fill us in on everything that will happen to our star-crossed couple in the years to come. But with or without it, "The Leave-Takers" does literary justice to a complex and arresting love story.