The End of the Novel of Love is a brisk, readable, often wise set of short essays that challenge the validity of the notion that love is transformative. Vivian Gornick romps through a number of key writers and texts (Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead) and shows how love is interrogated in these works and lives; that like all grand narratives love fails to answer all our concerns. It does not even help us ask the right questions. Love is neither curative nor creative. Although love always damaged us this damage once aided our struggle to be human--it no longer offers us even that. Useful, adult, instructive novels of love can no longer be written because love cannot do the work that it once did. Many of these pieces are brief to the point of being cursory and a critique of the continuing pull of romantic love/sex in contemporary novels would certainly have added to the weight of Gornick"s argument (she quickly dispatches Raymond Carver, for example, as being simply nostalgic). However The End of the Novel of Love stands as a mordant, well- articulated primer to a number of a notable novels and a suggestive corrective as to what ails modern letters.--Mark Thwaite