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T A B L E+T A L K

How often do you actually finish the book? Is it really necessary to read all the way to the end? Dilly-dallyers discuss in the Books area of Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

The role model syndrome
By Jake Lamar
Two new memoirs by talented black women show how hard it is to reconcile good writing and racial politics
(10/13/97)

R E C E N T L Y

A Calendar of Wisdom
By Leo Tolstoy
Nonfiction
(10/24/97)

New York Mosaic
By Isabel Bolton
Fiction
(10/23/97)

The New Men
By Brian Murphy
Nonfiction
(10/22/97)

Jackie Robinson
By Arnold Rampersad
Nonfiction
(10/21/97)

The Body Project
By Joan Jacob Brumberg
Nonfiction
(10/20/97)

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165 PAGES

BY LAURA MILLER | Vivian Gornick's personal essays offer penetrating insight into a very particular individual: female, urban, intellectual, literary, solitary and a seasoned veteran of the wrenching cultural shiftings of the past 50 years, particularly feminism. In last year's "Approaching Eye Level," she headily described her addiction to New York City's street scenes, her restless craving for brilliant conversation and society (roundly thwarted whenever she leaves the city for teaching gigs at various universities) and her own peculiar quandary -- a maddening, mutually exclusive tension between work and love, or more precisely, love and identity.

That tension unites the disconnected pieces (some new, some previously published) collected in "The End of the Novel of Love," Gornick's new book. In the titular essay, she makes a daring, persuasive argument: that "the idea of love as a means of illumination -- in literature as in life -- now comes as something of an anticlimax." Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina risked everything to pursue romantic passion, but it was the risk, and the ensuing suffering, she insists, that transformed those heroines and gave those novels their depth, not the passion itself. Describing a contemporary Jane Smiley novella in which a wife's infatuation brings a family to the brink of dissolution, Gornick observes, "If this woman leaves her husband for her lover, in six months she'll be right back where she started. There isn't a reason in the world to believe that she will know herself any better with the second man than she does with the first." In an age of easy divorce and shame-free adultery, romantic love has become just another insufficient "quick fix" in chronically vacant lives. You can't hang a powerful novel on its transformative capacity anymore.

Most of the rest of the essays in this book touch on this disillusionment, whether Gornick's analyzing a 19th century novel by the (unjustly) obscure George Meredith, the sad fate of Henry Adams' suicidal wife, Clover, the "muddy" vision of Kate Chopin and the lives and work of writers as varied as D.H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Rhys, Grace Paley and Hannah Arendt. She's in especially fine form in "Tenderhearted Men," a piece on the blinkered sentimentality of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Andre Dubus, contemporary writers who still yearn for the faded dream of romantic passion's redemptive potential. But this collection doesn't really develop Gornick's argument. It's more as if, having assembled these essays, Gornick and her editors recognized a recurring note, and dubbed the book accordingly. In an omission that seems too glaring to be missed by its perceptive author, "The End of the Novel of Love" never ventures to ask whether other kinds of love -- generative, familial, social or even spiritual -- might not suit where romance has failed.
SALON | Oct. 27, 1997