THE END OF THE NOVEL OF LOVE.

By Vivian Gornick. Beacon Press. 165 pp. $20

This slim book of intelligent linked essays is not well served by its sweeping title. Gornick, whose previous books range from a memoir of her mother to a meticulous sociological study of women in scientific careers, believes that the quest for love has lost its status as a central literary metaphor for transcendence and fulfillment, that "today... love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not discovery."

Those words form the conclusion of the book’s final (and title) essay, but Gornick seems little concerned with proving her insight or even systematically arguing it in the foregoing pages. What she does instead—and it’s more useful, in fact, than a straight-out argument—is to revisit literary figures and landmarks of the past century, and show how they are already enmeshed in new stories and questions about the emotional life, male or female—stories that go well beyond what scholars like to refer to as "the marriage-plot."

Some of the objects of Gornick’s revitalizing attention are familiar: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Willa Cather. Others have been neglected or half-forgotten, such as George Meredith and Jean Rhys. Some are remembered, but not for the works in which they grapple, successfully or unsuccessfully, with Gornick’s themes. The best of the rediscoveries is the essay on George Meredith’s novel Diana of the Crossways (1885), in which a passionately intellectual woman sabotages her romance with a politician because of a terrified certainty that intimacy will destroy, rather than fulfill, her hard-won individuality and autonomy.

What other stories, what struggles, might occupy a female character’s inner life besides the search for love and a happy marriage? Radclyffe Hall’s Unlit Lamp (1924), written before The Well of Loneliness (1928) made Hall notorious, deals movingly with the deep and destructive mutual dependence of mothers and daughters; Gornick links it to D. H. Lawrence’s parallel treatment of parent-child obsession in Sons and Lovers, then pivots to bring it up to date with Edna O’Brien’s short story "A Rose in the Heart of New York"—which she judges "more erotically disturbing than any of O’Brien’s love-affair-with-a-married-man stories. Certainly, it is more primitive."

The struggle between intimacy and autonomy takes many forms, and not only in fiction: Gornick muses sternly upon the revelation that Hannah Arendt remained close to fellow philosopher Martin Heidegger until his death, despite her Judaism and his Nazi sympathies; in another chapter, she conjures up a plausible background to the mysterious suicide of Henry Adams’s brilliant wife, Clover. The readings of literature work doubly well when paired with these readings of real life. They reinforce the sense that it is our selective response to these writers, not their own narrowness of range, that has kept us within the confines of the old-style happilyever-after story. Gornick’s obituary for the durable old "novel of love" seems premature at best. What she has shown instead is that it has plenty of competition.

—Amy E. Schwartz