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A review by ken_bookhermit
The End of the Novel of Love by Vivian Gornick
5.0
"Love, this truth tells us, like food or air, is necessary but insufficient: it cannot do for us what we must do for ourselves. Certainly, it can no longer act as an organizing principle. Romantic love now seems a yearning to dive down into feeling and come up magically changed; when what is required for the making of a self is the deliberate pursuit of consciousness. Knowing this to be the larger truth, as many of us do, the idea of love as a means of illumination—in literature as in life—now comes as something of an anticlimax."
What can I say? Vivian Gornick certainly had me by the throat through the entirety of this text. My being a sucker for literary criticism and writing about love shook me to my core, because the thesis of the entire collection has to do with understanding how now, love is not enough. And was it ever? Cutting to the truth of it, Gornick explores just how we as a culture is enthralled by the promise of love, except it just doesn't give us anything we expect anymore.
I did put that much stock on love—but not to the point where I am going to be changed (for "the better"), or that I will find out my real self through the eyes of the other, or through the passions that I would undergo in my experience of love. It speaks of a refusal to look into the self before you're even seen by the other, and that's just cringe to me. But still. To me, love is all.
In the majority of the essays, Gornick describes stories—both fictional and real—where the characters decide that love is not the end. Was it ever? Seems doubtful. Regardless, my entire experience of this collection is one that enlightens while simultaneously has me clutching to the ideal of love, not as the End All, but just because I love love for love's sake.
Attached are the texts Gornick talks about per chapter, for my reference.
1) Diana of the Crossways
> Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
> Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
> The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
> Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith
2) Clover Adams
not so much as analysed, but as supporting evidence:
> Democracy & Esther by Henry Adams
3) Kate Chopin
> The Awakening
4) Jean Rhys
> Wide Sargasso Sea
5) Ruthless Intimacies
> Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
> The Unlit Lamp by Radclyffe Hall
> Mary Olivier by May Sinclair
6) Willa Cather
> The Troll Garden
> O Pioneers!
> The Song of the Lark
> My Antonia
> Death Comes for the Archbishop
> The Professor's House
> My Mortal Enemy
> Lucy Gayheart
7) Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
not so much as analysed as referenced:
> Being and Time
> Eichmann in Jerusalem
8) Christina Stead
> The Man who Loved Children
> The Little Hotel
> I'm Dying Laughing
9) Grace Paley
> "An Interest in Life"
> "The Pale Pink Roast"
> "Faith in the Afternoon"
> "Wants"
10) Tenderhearted Men
> (I'm not going to read Raymond Carver again)
> The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
> Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus
> Adultery
> We Don't Live Here Anymore
11) The End of the Novel of Love
> The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
What can I say? Vivian Gornick certainly had me by the throat through the entirety of this text. My being a sucker for literary criticism and writing about love shook me to my core, because the thesis of the entire collection has to do with understanding how now, love is not enough. And was it ever? Cutting to the truth of it, Gornick explores just how we as a culture is enthralled by the promise of love, except it just doesn't give us anything we expect anymore.
I did put that much stock on love—but not to the point where I am going to be changed (for "the better"), or that I will find out my real self through the eyes of the other, or through the passions that I would undergo in my experience of love. It speaks of a refusal to look into the self before you're even seen by the other, and that's just cringe to me. But still. To me, love is all.
In the majority of the essays, Gornick describes stories—both fictional and real—where the characters decide that love is not the end. Was it ever? Seems doubtful. Regardless, my entire experience of this collection is one that enlightens while simultaneously has me clutching to the ideal of love, not as the End All, but just because I love love for love's sake.
Attached are the texts Gornick talks about per chapter, for my reference.
1) Diana of the Crossways
> Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
> Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
> The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
> Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith
2) Clover Adams
not so much as analysed, but as supporting evidence:
> Democracy & Esther by Henry Adams
3) Kate Chopin
> The Awakening
4) Jean Rhys
> Wide Sargasso Sea
5) Ruthless Intimacies
> Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
> The Unlit Lamp by Radclyffe Hall
> Mary Olivier by May Sinclair
6) Willa Cather
> The Troll Garden
> O Pioneers!
> The Song of the Lark
> My Antonia
> Death Comes for the Archbishop
> The Professor's House
> My Mortal Enemy
> Lucy Gayheart
7) Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
not so much as analysed as referenced:
> Being and Time
> Eichmann in Jerusalem
8) Christina Stead
> The Man who Loved Children
> The Little Hotel
> I'm Dying Laughing
9) Grace Paley
> "An Interest in Life"
> "The Pale Pink Roast"
> "Faith in the Afternoon"
> "Wants"
10) Tenderhearted Men
> (I'm not going to read Raymond Carver again)
> The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
> Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus
> Adultery
> We Don't Live Here Anymore
11) The End of the Novel of Love
> The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley