Book by Book (8 page)

The major novels. Courtship and illicit passion are the two principal themes of modern fiction. Many of the most famous English novels end with a marriage—
Tom Jones, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre
—but most of the great European masterpieces close on
heartbreak and death. Women dominate the nineteenth century's obsession with adultery, most famously in Leo Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
and Theodor Fontane's
Effi Briest
(see below for
Madame Bovary).
By the turn of the century, even English-speaking novelists give us their tragic heroines, like Edith Wharton's Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth
and Thomas Hardy's Tess in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

In the first half of the twentieth century, though, the focus shifts more to men lost to impossible or even unlawful desires, or to unbearable jealousy: Machado de Assis's bitter
Dom Casmurro
, Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
(especially the almost stand-alone novella of obsession, “Swann in Love”), F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
, Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice
, Ford Madox Ford's
The Good Soldier
(“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”), and Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
(“Light of my life, fire of my loins”). Yearning is what connects nearly all these books, the longing for an elusive, usually unattainable happiness.

Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary.
Not only one of the summits of prose art, but also the most sustained and intense look at a woman's restless search for love in modern fiction. In
Madame Bovary
Flaubert can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture a character in a short conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine, Emma Bovary, and her complacent husband, Charles, in a single sentence (one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). Returning from their wedding, the couple and the bridal party must cross a farmer's field: “Emma's dress was rather long and the hem trailed a bit;
from time to time she would stop and lift it up, then, with gloved fingers, delicately remove the wild grasses and tiny thistle burrs, while Charles stood empty-handed, waiting for her to finish” (Margaret Mauldon's translation). Flaubert may have intended us to regard his heroine as essentially shallow, even kitsch, a creature formed by impossible reveries of blissful self-fulfillment— whether in marriage, passion, or religious observance. Yet it's hard not to sympathize with the doomed young woman. For Emma tries, and tries hard, to live her dreams and in this sense is hardly different from, say, Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Or any of the rest of us. Don't we all ache with unabashed hopes, unassuageable desires? As time passes, Madame Bovary recalls a ball at La Vaubyessard as the single golden interlude in her drab life, a glimpse of paradise. Even so, “little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.” The yearning always remains.

For the modern reader, familiar with adultery, through magazine articles, television soap operas, and (possibly) personal experience,
Madame Bovary
shows how astonishingly common, even standardized is the blueprint for such illicit affairs: the soft-focused imaginings, the touch of a hand, a suggestive phrase or smile, the search for seclusion, the breathless rush to the lover's arms, the fear of exposure, the financial outlay (and the need to hide it), the ever-growing recklessness, and then, more and more often, the violent arguments and impossible demands, the violation of promises, mutual recrimination, and finally, inevitably, the tearful breakup, leading to further heartache,
embitterment, and, sometimes, relief. As Flaubert writes about the last days of Emma's affair with Léon, “They knew one another too well to experience that wonderment of mutual possession that increases its joy a hundredfold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma was discovering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage.”

Some early critics complained that Emma's story was a sordid and common one; yet that is, paradoxically, its glory. Her creator famously proclaimed that he himself was Madame Bovary—but failed to add that so are you, so am I. We are all the victims of unrealizable dreams, which shimmer so alluringly before our eyes, but just a little beyond our reach. “I admire tinsel as much as gold,” Flaubert once wrote in a letter. “Indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because it is sadder.”

And what of poetry itself? Virtually every poet writes about love, sooner or later, and some write about almost nothing else. In English one can read Byron's witty narrative poem
Don Juan
(“And sighing T will ne'er consent,' consented”) or George Meredith's heartbreaking account of a marriage coming apart,
Modern Love
(“Then each applied to each that fatal knife, / Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole”). Tennyson rhapsodizes of youth longing for kisses “sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned / On lips that are for others,” while Swinburne decadently celebrates “Our Lady of Pain” and “the raptures and roses of vice.” At the beginning of the nineteenth century Keats proclaims, “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” and at its
end Ernest Dowson blithely confides, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.”

Perhaps the best approach to the poetry of love is through an anthology like Walter de la Mare's
Love.
De la Mare, a poet, novelist, and short-story writer, was also an editor of genius. In
Love
he offers a 135-page introductory essay, followed by 700 pages of prose extracts and poems. The result is admittedly old-fashioned, including plenty of minor Georgian and keepsake verse, yet it is so packed a book, it seems inexhaustible. Open it at random, and you will find, for instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation of a celebrated Frangois Villon ballad:

Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora, the lovely Roman?
Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thai's,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere,—
She whose beauty was more than human? . . .
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Turn another page, and there is an even more famous ballad:

In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Mollie Malone,
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow through streets broad and narrow
Crying, “Cockles and mussels: alive, alive O!”

. . .

Love in our time. To write a good modern novel about love one must balance art against the pull of sentimentality and the temptations of sexual description. Too much of one or the other, and you end up with either a shopgirl romance or a marital aid. But among the novels of the last quarter of the twentieth century, these ten achieve near perfection in their very different visions of “Eros the bittersweet.”

1. James Salter,
Light Years.
A beautifully composed story of a perfect marriage (and family) slowly breaking down, its sentences like drops of rainwater: “Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue-checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”

2. Alexander Theroux,
Darconville's Cat.
“Darconville, the schoolmaster, always wore black.” This impassioned, original novel chronicles obsession, jealousy, and hate with a learned diction (and humor) as magnificent as any in the 17th century. For even more than Darconville loves the college student Isabel, Alexander Theroux loves the heavenly labials and ranting gutturals of the English language. At one moment he can use a word like “deipnosophist” (a person skilled in the art of dining and table talk) and in the next write with utter simplicity: “September: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.”

3. John Crowley,
Little, Big.
The most admired postwar American fantasy, this wistful love story begins when a young man marries a very special young woman. The Drinkwater clan resides in a turn-of-the-century house that seems to grow bigger the farther you go into it; their family photo album includes pictures of elves; and they turn out to be major players in the secret history of the world. The diminuendo of the book's closing sentences evokes its sad autumnal magic: “The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being, never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”

4. A. S. Byatt,
Possession: A Romance.
Two modern scholars search for the truth about a secret love affair between two eminent Victorian poets, the consequences of which spread out far more widely than suspected, even into the present. “I read your mind, my dear Mr. Ash. You will argue now for a monitored and carefully limited combustion . . . and there will be—Conflagration.”

5. Arundhati Roy,
The God of Small Things.
“They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.” This Booker Prize winner chronicles the heartbreaking story of a doomed affair between a young Indian woman and an untouchable, as well as its effect on two young children, Estha and Rahel. Arundhati Roy
structures her novel so that it builds to a final chapter of incandescent sexual ecstasy, even as we know too well the horror that will follow. Much of the beauty of the book arises from its similes: “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into the loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire.”

6. Penelope Fitzgerald,
The Blue Flower.
There is no waste in this apparently meandering, almost leisurely short novel. Written when its author was approaching eighty, it revolves around the love of the German romantic poet Novalis for an insignificant and rather plain young girl of fifteen. In merely 200 pages, Fitzgerald evokes a vanished world, the follies and realities of love, yearning and suffering. Even its minor characters are indelible. A successful surgeon realizes that the woman with whom he grew infatuated when young has forgotten his name: “What means something to us, that we can name. Sink, he told his hopes, with a kind of satisfaction, sink like a corpse dropped into the river. I am rejected, not for being unwelcome, not even for being ridiculous, but for being nothing.”

7. Ferdinand Mount,
Fairness.
“How cool and objective we mean to sound, how hot our hearts.” In this funny and heartbreaking novel, a rather staid Englishman finds his life ruined by a woman he adores and can never possess. “She ties men up in knots,” a character warns him, “just because her hair looks like a bunch of hay. If her follicles had a different juice in them, you wouldn't think twice about her.”

8. Edmund White,
The Married Man.
You might read this novel while listening to the slow jazz of a weary-hearted sax player.
The Married Man
is a winning portrait of gay Paris in the 1980s, a satire of American university life, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, an unsparing AIDS chronicle, but above all it is an utterly convincing love story. White's plangent, autumnal voice—like a loved one's whisper in the night—gradually summons up a lost world of wit and languor, of champagne dinners and simple lunches on sun-dappled terraces. But gradually this earthly paradise gives way to T-cell counts, and the novel's last quarter is a journey into the dark.

9. Philip Roth,
The Dying Animal.
A harrowing short novel about a cultivated man of seventy, a lifelong hedonist, who takes up with a voluptuous twenty-four-year-old student. After a period of the sheerest lust, Roth's hero suddenly finds himself suffering “these crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness, even of love.” Without quite knowing it, he confesses, “attachment creeps in. The eternal problem of attachment.”

10. Zadie Smith,
On Beauty.
“People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. . . .” This masterly novel takes up the myriad forms of Eros—first love, family happiness, irrational and illicit desire—and does so in language that can mirror the cultured speech of a British academic or the hip-hop patter of a black street poet. In the end, the reader
falls in love with the entire Belsey family, in all its quarrelsome, well-meaning confusion.

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. —Benjamin Disraeli

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. —Jonathan Swift

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.—Georg Lichtenberg

Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.—Samuel Johnson

Such things as an absence, the refusal of an invitation, or an unintentional coldness accomplish more than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.—Marcel Proust

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment. —Jane Austen

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. —Jorge Luis Borges

Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through.—John Updike

The truth is that what is interesting about love is how it doesn't work out.—Howard Moss

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson