The End of the Novel of Love.

Vivian Gornick has a clear thesis; she embodies it in the title, and summarizes it at the end of her book: "Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get something large?...that we will all learn something important....No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery."

The End of the Novel of Love is remarkable and seductive. In the first place Gornick writes exceptionally well; her lucidity, the subtle elegance and highly crafted intimacy of tone, carry a weight of conviction. The aesthetic pleasure that I experienced inclines me to agree intellectually.

In fact I do agree intellectually, sort of. I agree that, in British and American society, the choice between marriage and passion no longer creates the tension that it used to. Leaving a marriage, for whatever reason, has lost its risk. "Today there are no penalties to pay, no world of respectability to be excommunicated from," and consequently love does not push a woman (or a man) to the point where that "suffering which brings clarity and insight" becomes operative. I agree that "all for love and the world well-lost" is pretty meaningless when you are most unlikely to lose the world. (Interestingly, Gornick's examples are uncritically "straight": she does not mention the metaphor of tabooed passions - homosexual, incestuous, or otherwise inappropriate.)

My problem is not with Gornick's working out of her thesis, but with some of her underlying assumptions. To begin with, I think she gives an excessive centrality to the novel-of-love as forming the central metaphor of self-understanding over the last two hundred years for Western men and women. For every fiction that ends with the heroine sinking into his arms, or wishing she had, or repenting that she did, or deciding to stay with what she had got, there are far more that take other subjects as their controlling metaphor. There are all the genre novels to start with, plus satirical fiction, the bildungsroman, and the enormous number of novels that use faith, work, politics, or magic as their core metaphor (Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Voss, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Passage to India, Orlando, The Satanic Verses - for starters).

I'd further question that the inadequacies of love are a discovery as new as Gornick suggests. Here is Alexandra Kollontai in the 1920s:

How much energy and time we wasted in all our endless love tragedies and their complications! But it was also we who taught ourselves and those younger than we that love is not the most important thing in a woman's life. And that if she must choose between love and work, she should never hesitate: it is work, a woman's own creative work, that gives her the only real satisfaction and makes her life worth living.

Gornick's emphasis on love may be a cultural phenomenon. She writes, "When I was a girl the whole world believed in love." I imagine that I am about Gornick's age but I do not believe that was the message that I was given as a child; and certainly not that love was the route to female self-knowledge. And unlike Gornick, I did indeed frequently "walk into a house where I felt the parents loved each other." I lived in one. The "whole world" of Gornick's Bronx may have "believed in love," but at least some swaths of the Europe of my postwar childhood did not, at least not in the same way. Actually, I think what we were taught was that serene marriage would be the reward for self-knowledge gained through education plus moral and political endeavor: but that's another story.

What seems to underlie the questions I find myself needing to ask of The End of the Novel of Love is that Gornick has a somehow old-fashioned critical apparatus. This emerges in three specific ways. First, she seems to make no distinction between fictional characters, their authors, and other historical persons. Surely some distinction has to be drawn between Gwendolen Harlech, George Eliot, and Mary Ann Evans (Eliot's actual name).

But Gornick gives the interpretations of actual lives - Clover Adams, for example - and fictional characters like Diana Warwick as though they were identical. This confusion is increased by a classic life-and-works approach: we know what the authors meant by looking at their biographies. This is fun, and it's the tradition in which I was taught English literature, but I do not think it really holds water any more. Intentionality is not so straightforward. Moreover, all the postmodern work on the demands of genre, the readers' intentions, and so on cannot be written off so casually. I would have thought these considerations would be particularly strong in the case of premodern women writers.

Following from these old-fashioned critical instincts is Gornick's apparent certainty about how representation works: what characters do in novels is the same as what we do in reality, and reality is instructed very directly by art. I am not at all convinced by this. It is not clear to me that just because so many novels use love as a central metaphor, it necessarily follows that it is the major theme of people's lives - or vice versa.

Ironically, Gornick really does have a high moral view of the novel - its purpose is edification, which means for her "discovery" not "nostalgia." I am dubious about whether this is the contemporary function of the novel, and even if it would be a good thing if true. Perhaps as we venture into dangerous places of self-discovery, fiction provides a desirable haven of moral nostalgia. Perhaps novels are not about self-discovery but about emotional information. Perhaps they are about language, and not about morals at all. Reading Gornick I was frequently reminded of Angela Carter's scathing comment, "Novels are etiquette manuals for teaching young ladies how to behave in the social circles to which they aspire." Carter's unfashionable view is a possibility, at least as strong as Gornick's elevating certainty.

I am an old-fashioned moralist too. At one level I am enchanted by the ethical demands Gornick makes of both novels and readers. But it does seem a pity that she chose to publish her ideas as a collection of essays rather than work them into a book. I am quite certain, because of the intelligence of her prose and the sensitivity of her perceptions, that she is aware of these problems; but she has given herself no way to address them. The form of this essay collection itself precisely prevents the "large thing" that she so admires in fiction emerging out of some exquisite small analyses.

But it may be too late. The novel, by Carter's definition at least, is necessarily a bourgeois form. It may be not that the metaphor of love in the novel is coming to an end, but the metaphor and the place of the novel in society has run out of steam.

Sara Maitland's most recent book is Angel Makers: The Collected Stories (Henry Holt).