The End of The Novel of Love - Softcover

Gornick, Vivian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807062235 ISBN 13: 9780807062234

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this book of new and collected critical essays, Vivian Gornick turns the searching intelligence and honesty of insight that mark her memoirs on the work - and the lives - of writers she admires, among them Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead, and George Meredith. In doing so, she examines a century of novels of love-in-the-Western-world and comes to see that, for most writers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation.

About this title

Review:

The End of the Novel of Love is a brisk, readable, often wise set of short essays that challenge the validity of the notion that love is transformative. Vivian Gornick romps through a number of key writers and texts (Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead) and shows how love is interrogated in these works and lives; that like all grand narratives love fails to answer all our concerns. It does not even help us ask the right questions. Love is neither curative nor creative. Although love always damaged us this damage once aided our struggle to be human--it no longer offers us even that. Useful, adult, instructive novels of love can no longer be written because love cannot do the work that it once did.

Many of these pieces are brief to the point of being cursory and a critique of the continuing pull of romantic love/sex in contemporary novels would certainly have added to the weight of Gornick's argument (she quickly dispatches Raymond Carver, for example, as being simply nostalgic). However The End of the Novel of Love stands as a mordant, well- articulated primer to a number of a notable novels and a suggestive corrective as to what ails modern letters.--Mark Thwaite

Review:

Reading [Gornick] is a thrilling, invigorating, challenging experience. -Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Vivian Gornick's prose is so penetrating that reading it can be almost painful. . . . [The End of the Novel of Love]-in which she examines various connections between love and literature-stands out as a model of luminous clarity." -Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times

"[Gornick] is fearless. . . . Grounded as she is in the moral breadth, psychological acuity, esthetic sophistication and infinite sense of life we expect from good novels and good readers alike, Gornick can listen to what a pair of old married friends casually say to each other over dinner in a Chinese restaurant and detect change in the Zeitgeist. . . . Reading her essays, one is reassured that the conversation between life and literature is mutually sustaining as well as mutually corrective, and that it is likely to continue both in spite of and because of our changes of heart-in love or out of it." -Elizabeth Frank, The New York Times Book Review

"The End of the Novel of Love is small in bulk but large in implication. The book is a pleasure and a stimulus: persuasive, finely wrought, quivering with intelligence." -George Scialabba, Boston Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0807062235
• ISBN 13: 9780807062234
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172