THE STUFF OF LOVE
Two very different love stories that take readers into other lives and alternative realities
With her debut Work Like Any Other US author Virginia Reeves established herself as an astute chronicler of complexities of marriage. With this new novel, The Behaviour of Love, she returns to the subject.
It tells the story of Ed and Laura, a young couple who move to Montana in the early 1970s. He is a behavioural psychologist charged with running a home for the developmentally damaged. She is an artist eager to start a family.
Doctor Ed is a caring and ambitious doctor, determined to improve the lives of his patients, especially a beautiful young woman with epilepsy, Penelope. This is a time when the disease is understood to be a kind of idiocy, so the girl enjoys daily meetings with the doctor as they search for a cure.
Despite his training, Ed is a not a man entirely aware of his impulses. His love for Laura is sincere; he is desperate for a child, a family with her. He knows his time with Penelope wears on his marriage, and yet he cannot give up on her as in his own way he loves her, and despite his desire to remain professional, he is blind to the damage he causes.
What prevents The Behaviour of Love becoming simply a love triangle is the tension between Ed and Laura’s stories. Unlike Ed’s, Laura’s chapters are told in the first person and she is clear-eyed about her husband’s ambition and his inability to see her — to give her the attention their marriage needs. Then in the second half of the novel, there is a radical shift.
Set largely in the world of the mentally damaged, it’s a poignant exploration both of the disorienting nature of impaired brains and the enduring capacity of love. Like Alex Landragin’s Crossings, The Behaviour of Love is a literary novel, one that relies on poetry to find a way through the havoc. It is hard not to read Laura and Penelope as references to Petrarch and Homer, nor to see Ed as a sort of charismatic king. Together their stories are heartbreaking, absorbing and of this world.
Crossings is an altogether different sort of love story. This romance is mysterious, fantastical and often good fun. It claims to be a found manuscript that includes three stories: “the first of them, The Education of a Monster, appears to be a short fiction written by Charles Baudelaire … the second story City of Ghosts is a kind of noir thriller set in Paris in 1940, seemingly narrated by Walter Benjamin … the third story, Tales of the Albatross, is the strangest of the three; it seems to be the autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress.”
Crossings is a literary puzzle, one that invites its reader to approach it in two different ways — it can be read straight through or according to page numbers, a kind of hypertext at the end of each chapter that takes you to a different part of the book. Either way, you are lured into a world governed by the idea of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls into new bodies — also known as a crossing.
This means in practice an individual could live many lives, given that as one ages one can simply cross into a younger body and carry on. In this way it is possible for an ageing Baudelaire to write a story for the girl whose body he will come to inhabit. Then for that story to be purchased for the Baudelaire Society, while a version of the woman who “reminded” Baudelaire how to cross in the first place sends a young writer to kill the president of said society — Coco Chanel. Mercifully, perhaps, the gun had no bullets.
It sounds a bit silly, but as a novel Crossings works. It is good fun and Landragin manages to keep the idea viable over 150 years and a sizeable cast of characters. He can do this, in part, because of the obsessive nature of book lovers and writers, and because, ultimately, the novel is a love story that zooms through time and right around the globe. The Behaviour of Love Virginia Reeves, Simon & Schuster $32.99