The End of The Novel of Love
Essayist Gornick's (Approaching Eye Level, LJ 9/96) critical incisions are swift and certain, and in this latest collection she performs her literary surgery on writers who pursued in their work or represented personally a fatal flaw of self-knowledge: Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, and Hannah Arendt, among others. Gornick is interested in writers who transcend the 19th-century notion of romantic love?she uses the suicide of high-minded Clover Adams, trapped in her marriage to Samuel, as an emblem of that storybook failure. Gornick writes of Rhys that she managed to "leave obsession behind" and "pull from herself the long life of slowly clarifying thought that justifies a writer's life." In one essay, Gornick even deigns to include in her canon "tenderhearted men"?Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Andre Dubus?who treat in their work the "loss of romantic possibility." While Gornick's hyperbolic pronoucements lose their umph after a while, her writing is so clean and precise that the reader gasps for more. Highly recommended.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.