South of Our Selves: Mexico in the Poems of Williams, Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, Levertov and Hayden Book

Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.

In The End of the Novel of Love, the amazing Vivian Gornick analyzes the evolution of love's portrayal in Western literature throughout the 20th century. She starts with the novel Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith and ends her literary journey with some thoughts on The Age of Grief, a novella by Jane Smiley published in 1987. Between the two, she writes gorgeously and illuminatingly about the works of Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, D.H. Lawrence, Kate Chopin, Raymond Carver and many others, constantly asking poignant, courageous questions that have important implications. Can love still be seen as the royal road towards self-knowledge and enlightenment? Can contemporary literature, after a century that uncovered that the effort of forging a selfhood "is a solitary one, more akin to the act of making art than of making family" ignore this hard-won knowledge and the imperatives of the self? Can art still portray romantic love as the only salvation without ringing hollow?

Her essays are not an indictment of love or a negation of the possibility of it in our age. They are simply an analysis of the Zeitgeist and the change in it, an acknowledgement of the shift in our psyches, and the ongoing search for the meaning of life, in which romantic love is still important, albeit not the complete answer.

Gornick writes fabulously about all this. Both fiercely and full of grace. She never demands submission or abandonment to her stances and ideas, but her thought-provoking explorations, her intimate, powerful connection to literature, her sharp feminist eye generate nothing but respect and admiration. For me personally it is a true pleasure to discover her voice again and again and to see how deeply and clearly she perceives the infinite dialogue between reality and art and their never-ending manners of nourishing and perfecting one another.