The End Of The Novel Of Love (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
The end of the novel of love, and, thus, the end of love, and the end of love as a metaphor. This is what modernity hath wrought, and so forth. The point is: too much has happened (to us, as individuals, as peoples, as nations, recently) for us to hold onto the belief in love as the ultimate source of transcendental life and self-knowledge. Love simply does not work, and does not do the work for us, in life or in fiction. For women in particular, love (and marriage), as Berlant discusses in The Female Complaint, constitutes and is produced by an intimate public that is fraught as fuck — I think we all agree when feminists assert that heterosexual love and marriage are merely well-developed and unjust technologies for the appropriation of women's labour — and so freedom, for women, almost certainly demands a systematic rejection of romantic heterosexual attachments. That settled, the question for current and future writers is: how does a woman — as an intelligent, thinking, feeling, loving, desiring, sexual being — chart her course to freedom under patriarchy? Gornick makes the strong suggestion that mother-daughter relationships (and by extension, female friendships and intimacies) are key to understanding the revolutionary potential of women's lives beyond the heterosexual love plot. She makes no bones about it: No man (author or fictional character) has done the job or can embody what women are after.As with all great books, this is one I wish that I had read keenly years ago (two years ago, in fact, would have been timely, when I was asking myself difficult questions about my own botched marital situation and the absurdity of disastrously yet enthusiastically diving into a new affair — which made me want things I didn't know how to want — in order to fix the problems of the old. Spoiler alert: my train lurched from one disaster to another, and a next, and again, then plunged off the precipice to a flaming end. C'est la vie.) But necessary books arise when we need them most and it is the case that I could only have read this book fervently, now, and not before now, but only now, after fucking up so much of my life and several women's lives.Gornick has a firm hand on the wheel and her foot hard on the pedal throughout this necessary book. It's a slim book, easily read in a single day if not a single sitting — which is precisely what Virginia Woolf said of most vital writing by women: the constraints on a woman's time are severe, her writing must be exacting and laconic, her thinking swift and effective.Two misgivings: First, as far as I can tell, Gornick does not discuss any writers of colour (in passing, she mentions the long struggles of the Civil Rights Era, but goes no further). This seems an unforgivable and brutally negligent omission. Second, though she centres heterosexual romantic relations (Willa Cather, who was certainly queer, is mentioned, but Gornick does not dive very deep into the implications of her queerness on the love plot; instead, she extrapolates and redemptively reads Cather's ecological eroticism — nativism? naturalism? — as a productive outgrowth of her — Cather's — sexlessness), the omission of lesbian or gay authors is disturbing. It would have been powerful, for instance, for Gornick to engage with James Baldwin's Another Country (1962); a text which burns with its attention to both hetero- and homosexual romantic relations as well as marital relations, and which deepens our understanding of difference (of race, gender, sexual orientation) and the impossibilities of love in a way that was and still is certainly groundbreaking — I am certain that Ida Scott is one of the great women of black literature, a peer even of the peerless Sula Peace. (By invoking Baldwin, Gornick would have even got two — queer, of colour — for the price of one! But let's not be lazy: Gornick could have easily grabbed some literature from The Harlem Renaissance — Harlem being just a borough away from her Bronx stomping ground). It might have also been useful to think about how the era of AIDS managed to further dismantle our faith in limitless intimacy (intimacy, infidelity, love, could and still do routinely, literally kill lovers). I found myself wanting a bit more detail around the historical effects of material conditions on the love plot (but perhaps what I find myself wanting is beyond the scope of the book and might be dealt with by a Foucauldian).That said, I love Gornick. I worship at her feet, albeit with a critical upward gaze. What this book does, it does perfectly well.***Subashini's review is a very intresting reading of Gornick's book, and is very much worth reading.
I'm going to be lazy and simply link to Nicholas' review because it's good and summarises quite well what was left out of Gornick's discussion.This is a book I wish I had read about ten years ago because it's rich, full of unpredictable insights, particularly the sections where she talks about the anxieties and erotics of the mother-daughter bond (or trap, as it might be). It made me want to seek out lesser-known works by well known writers (Radclyffe Hall's The Unlit Lamp, Willa Cather's Song of the Lark and also books I'd never heard of, like George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways and May Sinclair's Mary Olivier). I'm stumped, though, by her discussion of Arendt and Heidegger, which I think boils down to "sex, or an erotic attachment fused with mental compatibility, leads to bad judgment" which I suppose can be true but seems to let Arendt off the hook (and doesn't take into account her politics, and the role it might have played in her relationship with Heidegger and her subsequent defence of his position). In other words, there might be more to Arendt's susceptibility to Heidegger's vile politics than mere "the sex was good"/"the mind sex was even better", etc. I'm being unfair to Gornick here but it generally reads this way.Then, there is the matter of Gornick's disillusionment with communism, which, ehhhh. No.
What do You think about The End Of The Novel Of Love (1998)?
I read this book after just having finished Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, and I suspect this is why I often came to think about the relation between Gornick and her own mother (as presented in "Fierce Attachments") while reading "The End ...". In "The End ..." the relationship between mothers and daughters are discussed in essays on Radclyffe Hall’s "The Unlit Lamp", May Sinclair’s "Mary Oliver", and Edna O’Brien’s short story "A Rose in the Heart of New York". Gornick shows how the relationships between mothers and daughters in these novels are symbiotic and swallow up the daughters completely. The daughters struggle their whole lives to free themselves, from their mothers - just as Vivian Gornick herself has done, again according to her own memoir. What Gornick in fact is saying in these essays is that incestuous love between mothers and daughters make sane, adult relationships impossible. Her memoir suggest she is talking from experience.
—Sigrun Hodne
“I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. . . . It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. . . . It is more that . . . after all that schooling, all that care . . . the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.”Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief“We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged.”
—astried
Vivian Gornick's The End of the Novel of Love presents a much different read then what I'm used to. I typically read works of fiction, but Gornick gives readers her take on how these novels are made, essentially a critique of other books. Really, what we have here is a nonfiction book that incorporates plenty of fiction. At first glance, the title makes one think that we're going to read about how love novels are coming to an end. Though not presented in this format, what we think we're going to get is actually what receive, though not in the most orthodox manner. I was confused when I first started reading The End of the Novel of Love because Gornick referenced books that I had not read nor heard of. I had to go back and reread parts of each section, but the more I read, the more her words began to make sense to me. Her style is like this: Bring up the author and his/her personal life. After this, she applies it to one or more of his/her novels. When Gornick does this, it allows readers to understand that great stories don't just pop out of thin air. The relationships that authors have with people is extremely important and influential in a piece. One man even based his stories on his marriage, though loosely. Gornick uses Henry and Clover Adams, a couple that did not have the ideal marriage. They were not happy and this lack of happiness was well represented in Henry Clover's novels. Henry did not use his wife, under the guise of different names for, as the protagonist in not just one love story, but multiples books of his that were published. He felt that he was wife was the reason behind his unhappiness and they lived in a time where divorce was not popular, so the couple had no choice but to suffer. In the meantime, Clover would write letters to her father each Sunday, which was the only thing that kept her alive. She eventually killed herself. Ironically, she killed herself on a Sunday. One of Henry Adams' characters, based on Clover, killed herself also. It's unclear as to whether or not she killed herself because she read the book, or because she just dreaded her life so much. This is one of the many connections between real life and the world of fiction that Vivian Gornick brings up. The End of the Novel of Love essentially is not only about how loves in novels end, but about the end of the lives of the authors, starting with their troubled lives. Reading each section of her book gives a different idea as to how she feels the novel of love is "ending." She does repeat ideas, but if you're ready to listen to someone state facts, throw in opinions, and then comment on them, read this book. It's something different and it'll definitely make you see the books that you read in a different light.
—Jalen Flores
