The End of The Novel of Love [Paperback]

Vivian Gornick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998

Offers powerful insight into the portrayal of romantic love by Jean Rhys, Clover Adams, Christina Stead, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and others.

"Gornick makes forceful and dramatic judgments. . . . She is fearless."
-Elizabeth Frank, The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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.

From Kirkus Reviews

Essayist and journalist Gornick (Fierce Attachments, 1987; The Approaching Eye, 1996) gathers under one cover 11 essays that explore the meaning of love and marriage as literary themes in the 20th century. Gornick writes in a pithy, intensely concentrated literary style that is individual, uncannily precise, and a pleasure to read. Consider her comments on Grace Paley's prose: ``These sentences are born of a concentration in the writer that runs so deep, is turned so far inward, it achieves the lucidity of the poet. . . . The material is at one with the voice speaking.'' This is true of Gornick's own prose. She has the extraordinary ability to cut to the bone of our common experience with just a few, well-chosen words. What makes her work unusual for a book of this sort is that she persuades by the power of her language--gracefully poised between objective knowledge and subjective experience--more than by discursive argument. Her governing idea is this: Love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness. Modern experience cannot bear out these traditional meanings. It's not that people can no longer fall in love and be happily married. But the traditional scenario of love and marriage in the age of divorce and contraception ``cannot provide insight, it can only repeat a view of things that today feels sadly tired and without the power to make one see anew.'' Gornick's subtle ear and mind illuminate works by Paley, Willa Cather, George Meredith, Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, Christina Stead, and Radclyffe Hall. Not all familiar names, but Gornick makes you want to read the ones you don't know and reread the ones you do. An exceptionally well-written, original, and thought-provoking set of essays. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807062235
• ISBN-13: 978-0807062234
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,263,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent analysis; somewhat troubling conclusion..., January 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The End of the Novel of Love (Hardcover)

After finishing Gornick's excellent book, I could not help feeling something grating against my sensibilities. The analysis was flawless, the insight superb, even profound. I spent several hours working the thing through my skull and writing things down to put in order what it was that made me uneasy with Gornick's final proclamation that love (romantic, traditional marriage, etc.) no longer serves as a viable metaphor for the making of literature. And even then, after hours of this, I still could not put my finger on it. Reading the Kirkus Review, I found myself even further perplexed. Kirkus says: "Her governing idea is this: Love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness." Herein lies, I think, part of the problem: I have no trouble agreeing with Gornick that romantic love, marriage, and sexual fulfillment hold little or no true source of success and happiness in and of themselves, both in our time and, I would say, in any time. In this sense, they no longer serve us well as "metaphors" of happiness, as Kirkus notes. However, this is not the extent of Gornick's conclusion, and a somewhat misleading way of describing it. Kirkus fails to continue on to the final idea that not only are these things (romantic love, marriage, sexual fulfillment) not viable metaphors for success and happiness in our lives--they are no longer viable metaphors for the creation of literature as well. In this, I find myself disagreeing with Gornick. In my mind, this is akin to declaring ANY subject an unviable metaphor for the creation of literature. Are we to cease writing of marriage and romantic love simply because the rules have changed and the meanings of these things have shifted with cultural and societal changes? I think the very fact that this marvelous book exists--a book of powerful, insightful literature dealing with our perception and understanding of romantic love, marriage, etc. (both real and literary)--threatens to undermine its whole premise. With dazzling skill and analysis, Gornick proves (perhaps despite herself) that there IS something left to say about love, and that great literature can still arise from an examination of love, and from the metaphor of love. Her love affair with words, her love affair with love, with literature--we see it, we feel it, even if Gornick makes the choice to ignore it and allow the intellectual discourse to play itself out to its solid, logical, somewhat "cold" conlusion (love as mere "necessity?" Eating, sleeping, defecating--these are necessity; surely love is something more than simple necessity...). In the end, Gornick's style, form, language, insight--these become the elements of that great, constant love affair which will always define and drive and sustain literature: the love affair between author and audience.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful reading experience., October 20, 1998

By 

Nancy Werlin (Massachusetts, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of The Novel of Love (Paperback)

The essays in this small book on literature, women, and writing are short and simply written, and yet full of the excitement of thought and the importance of literature to our psyches. Gornick made me want (and plan) to read or re-read the books she talks about.

This is simply one of the best books of essays I've encountered in years. Thank you, Vivian Gornick.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars literary criticism of the highest order, December 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The End of the Novel of Love (Hardcover)

Vivian Gornick is like the best English professor you ever had--or never had. Her short, cogent essays on women writers and female literary characters will send you back to a rereading of Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys and others. Vivian Gornick explores the lack of options and choices for women in the past--what was there beyond love and marriage?--and the failure of this thinking for women in the present day, both in life and in literature. She is a feminist who writes without jargon or any academic pretentiousness. I recommend this as literary criticism of the highest order.