Web Letters | The Nation

Web Letter

This is a beautifully written review by a critic who has transcended the current practice of an intellectually stimulated approach to putting a particular form of art, in this case the book, under the lens, with emotions firmly extruded from the process.

Miriam Markowitz instead gives the impression of ingesting and analyzing the contents, even as she has her ears strained to hear the finer nuances of the spoken and the inarticulated in the writer's work. And the greatest tribute of all is, of course, that the lay reader is actually tempted to buy the book and read it for herself .

Web Letter

I enjoyed Miriam Markowitz's thoughtful and humorous piece, and agree that as we lower our stakes with fewer taboos, we drain away the risk that heightens passion.

I also find that as we enter marriage later, we become too aware of context and second and third chances. We see too clearly that there are an array of possible life companions for each of us, and that any marriage or romance will bring both joys and strains, exhilaration and limits. No one is the one.

If poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquility," then as a nostalgic 41-year-old I'm two steps removed from the particular passion I felt at 21, when I wrote this senryu:

Love kills poetry!
Neither hand is free to write
with two breasts to hold.

Web Letter

Poor, lovely Eros: hauled off and waterboarded by your reviewer's prose style.

Web Letter

A highly cultivated and informative article. The university English department should be proud of the author and the critic. But ideas worthy of review are missing from the book and the review. What might they be?

First, love and romance are bound by social class. The romantic life, loves and power of a upper-class woman are different from those of the middle-class and working-class woman. We see this in literature often enough, but there is not a mention in the review of the role social class plays in love and romance.

Second, ethnicity plays a role in love and romance. With a minor acknowledgment that Latin American authors have a different slant on the subject, the review (and perhaps the book?) occupies itself with the classical Western traditions. What happened to the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese literatures? The Asian, African and Middle Eastern perspectives are also missing.

Third, American love and romance may be in trouble. The rate of failed marriages in the United States is elevated. Yet, as Ms. Tupper Thomas, the administrator of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, likes to note, "the brides just keep on coming" to the ceremonial fountains at the entrance to the park, adjacent to the triumphal arch of the Grand Army of the Republic. Indeed, no plans to redesign the fountains or close them down.

The "brides keep on coming" from every country in the world. I deeply suspect the English departments are seriously underrepresented among the brides.

Fourth, the increasing economic emancipation of the American woman, the mass availability of effective birth control and the cultural decline of contemporary American manhood contribute powerfully to a transitory infelicity regarding love and romance.

I appreciate the richness of the review and look forward to reading the book.