What Is This Thing Called Love? Book

More likely than not you know him as Willy Wonka (hopefully better than that Johnny Depp/Michael Jackson abomination). You might also know him as the Waco Kid or Young Frankenstein (Fronk-en-steen!). Whatever the case, chances are you know Gene Wilder. What you might not know is he has retired from acting he has turned his attentions to painting and writing. In 2005 he published his memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. He followed that up with two novels, My French Whore, a love story set during WWI, and The Woman Who Wouldn't, another European romance. What Is This Thing Called Love? is a collection of short stories about love published earlier this year. So, how good is this product of Wilder's world of pure imagination?

Sorry to carry on the Wonka puns, but if I had to describe this book in two words they'd be 'bad chocolate.' Or maybe not bad, just mediocre. You know what I'm talking about. Chocolate is all made of the same basic stuff, but there's still chocolate that's good (Cadbury's) and chocolate that's bad-to-middling (Hershey's). However, unlike chocolate, these stories aren't very filling. They are all pretty short, and they look at love from a variety of angles. The stories are charming, but are all lacking in something, usually substance but sometimes poignancy or a decent ending as well.

That lack of poignancy is sometimes the most surprising thing that's missing. A few of the stories are about widowers. Wilder's wife Gilda Radner died in 1989. You would think that someone who had been through that experience might show how heartbreaking it is, but I'm not sure that Wilder quite gets there. Most of the time the widower will say his wife died a few years ago and not mention her again. However, there is one story titled "The Anniversary" which is about a man waiting to meet his wife at a restaurant for their 17th anniversary before a waiter reminds him that his wife died a year ago. This would be more poignant, perhaps, if the reader was given some indication that the man was in wny way forgetful, but he seems to remember everything, including a pair of earrings his wife liked "weeks and weeks ago" and what country the maitre d' is from, except for the fact that his wife is dead. It just comes across as a cheap twist, like in "The Hollywood Producer," when a man spends the second half of a story hitting on someone, only to find at the very end that she's a transvestite.

There are few instances of truly bad writing, though, and usually they're in stories about young love. In the story "The Kiss" a teenage girl says that she's in love with a twenty-something writer and her father responds "YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO LOVE! You're too young and that's it and that's all!" Later after he meets the man they have an awkward conversation that ends with the father saying "YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO LOVE MY DAUGHTER, and that's it and that's all" (emphasis Wilder's). Anyone at all familiar with melodrama knows this story will end with them getting married. Another story ends with a girl writing letters to her mother to tell her about her sexual experiences with her first lover. I could be wrong, but I don't think girls actually do this.

Usually the stories aren't that awkwardly bad, but they never quite rise to being good, either. I'll admit that I bought this book because I saw it was by Gene Wilder and I wanted to see what one of my favorite actors of my youth had written about love. I don't totally regret that decision, but I didn't get much out of it, either, except for the feeling that I've read these stories before, and done better.

Mediocre, yes. Scrumdiddlyumptious? No.