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the book of love
Nov. 5th, 2023 07:27 pmKelly Link, The Book of Love.
I spent a year in college listening to 69 Love Songs on repeat. This is the most quintessential queer-teenager experience I've ever had, although (a late bloomer in this respect) I was in my early twenties before I owned the album. One of the Magnetic Fields' sixty-nine songs is "The Book of Love." After half a lifetime of falling for books full of music without recognizing any of the allusions, I'm startled when I know a reference:
There you have it: The Book of Love is about music, unclearly reciprocated devotion, being nineteen, and--the book in the song was, it warns us, "written very long ago"--the weird stretched feeling of eternity. Book of Love is also the first full-length novel by Kelly Link. For some people, that will be recommendation enough on its own. For people who want to know more, or enjoy watching writerly attempts to describe the numinous reflect each other like lines of mirrors, here is a sketch of what appears.
Near the beginning of the book, four teenagers return from the dead. Two of them, David and Laura, used to be in a band. Laura's sister Susannah was also in that band. Neither she nor Laura can shake the feeling that they are backwards--that Susannah is the one who should have fucked up in an unpredictable way, like dying.
One of the other songs layered into The Book of Love is the ballad of Tam Lin. It's not a direct Tam Lin retelling, not even as close as Nghi Vo's Siren Queen, which weaves the ballad in among many other strands. However, we do meet a beautiful man named Thomas who serves a dangerous mistress. That mistress is the book's antagonist, though it's possible that Laura, who has always been a good girl--ambitiously good--is even more terrifying.
One of the characters in The Book of Love is a Black woman who had a hugely successful career writing romances about a purple-eyed redhead. Rather than settling down after one book to live happily ever after, as modern genre convention would have it, the doubly fictional Lavender Glass fled between pirate ships and Scottish castles, having one adventure after another. I don't want to imply that all the love in Book of Love is romantic--for starters, the romance writer character I just mentioned is a beloved grandmother--but I was interested in the book's take on romantic love. There's a strong measure of awe in much of it. There's also a lot of casual sex that nobody expects to last. Often these feelings exist simultaneously.
Romance novels generally assume that the romantic leads are good for each other, even if it takes them a book's worth of misunderstandings to realize it. In The Book of Love, it's always possible that the beautiful person who just kissed you might be la belle dame sans merci. That kiss might also be something that is tremendously important now, but will not matter when you cease to be nineteen; or you might be destroying a relationship that matters dearly because you assume nothing you do can matter yet. I very much admire Link's willingness to let all these possibilities exist simultaneously.
The Book of Love reminds me of another Tam Lin book, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I read over and over when I was beginning to be a teenager and didn't want to be. Both books slide back and forth between hilarious and meticulously observed accounts of everyday life and supernatural danger. They're each packed with enough reference and mysterious implication to fill six ordinary novels. These are not the books you read if you want every little thing explained (unless you want to make a career from the explaining), but they are books to read more than once.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. It will be released on my birthday, February 13.)
I spent a year in college listening to 69 Love Songs on repeat. This is the most quintessential queer-teenager experience I've ever had, although (a late bloomer in this respect) I was in my early twenties before I owned the album. One of the Magnetic Fields' sixty-nine songs is "The Book of Love." After half a lifetime of falling for books full of music without recognizing any of the allusions, I'm startled when I know a reference:
The book of love has music in it In fact that's where music comes from Some of it is just transcendental Some of it is just really dumb But I... I love it when you sing to me...
There you have it: The Book of Love is about music, unclearly reciprocated devotion, being nineteen, and--the book in the song was, it warns us, "written very long ago"--the weird stretched feeling of eternity. Book of Love is also the first full-length novel by Kelly Link. For some people, that will be recommendation enough on its own. For people who want to know more, or enjoy watching writerly attempts to describe the numinous reflect each other like lines of mirrors, here is a sketch of what appears.
Near the beginning of the book, four teenagers return from the dead. Two of them, David and Laura, used to be in a band. Laura's sister Susannah was also in that band. Neither she nor Laura can shake the feeling that they are backwards--that Susannah is the one who should have fucked up in an unpredictable way, like dying.
One of the other songs layered into The Book of Love is the ballad of Tam Lin. It's not a direct Tam Lin retelling, not even as close as Nghi Vo's Siren Queen, which weaves the ballad in among many other strands. However, we do meet a beautiful man named Thomas who serves a dangerous mistress. That mistress is the book's antagonist, though it's possible that Laura, who has always been a good girl--ambitiously good--is even more terrifying.
One of the characters in The Book of Love is a Black woman who had a hugely successful career writing romances about a purple-eyed redhead. Rather than settling down after one book to live happily ever after, as modern genre convention would have it, the doubly fictional Lavender Glass fled between pirate ships and Scottish castles, having one adventure after another. I don't want to imply that all the love in Book of Love is romantic--for starters, the romance writer character I just mentioned is a beloved grandmother--but I was interested in the book's take on romantic love. There's a strong measure of awe in much of it. There's also a lot of casual sex that nobody expects to last. Often these feelings exist simultaneously.
Romance novels generally assume that the romantic leads are good for each other, even if it takes them a book's worth of misunderstandings to realize it. In The Book of Love, it's always possible that the beautiful person who just kissed you might be la belle dame sans merci. That kiss might also be something that is tremendously important now, but will not matter when you cease to be nineteen; or you might be destroying a relationship that matters dearly because you assume nothing you do can matter yet. I very much admire Link's willingness to let all these possibilities exist simultaneously.
The Book of Love reminds me of another Tam Lin book, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I read over and over when I was beginning to be a teenager and didn't want to be. Both books slide back and forth between hilarious and meticulously observed accounts of everyday life and supernatural danger. They're each packed with enough reference and mysterious implication to fill six ordinary novels. These are not the books you read if you want every little thing explained (unless you want to make a career from the explaining), but they are books to read more than once.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. It will be released on my birthday, February 13.)