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Love and the Novel by Christina Lupton review – can you live life by the book?
In this clever, thought-provoking memoir, a married academic’s life is ‘derailed by desire’. Can reading help her find a way forward?
Not so long ago, there was something of a craze in publishing for books about reading, one for which I didn’t much care at the time. But Christina Lupton’s Love and the Novel has little in common with the platitudinous manuals that particular trend delivered to the common reader. Its author, an academic with a special interest in the history of reading, doesn’t hope to turn fiction into a form of self-help, nor is she particularly interested in whether a character’s predicament “resonates” with her own situation. Long years of teaching have taught her not only that novels are not blueprints for living, but that the job of a writer is not “to tell us what we’re really like”, nor even how we should behave. In short, Elizabeth Bennet is not, and never will be, your friend.
Lupton’s narrative, part memoir, part literary criticism, isn’t cuddly or confiding. It asks more questions than it answers; there’s something withholding (though interestingly so) at its heart. But it is a clever, well-written book, and I often found myself underlining whole paragraphs as I read. If it is sometimes unintentionally comical – Lupton grew up in a commune in rural Australia, and she has a quaintly earnest hippy side – it is more often wonderfully insightful. Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, the letters of Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: I’ve never read accounts of any of these texts that manage to be at once so searching and so wondrously concise, and Lupton made me want to go back to them all (a particular achievement in the case of The Waterfall, a novel from the 60s that seemed of its time even in 1984, which was when I somewhat furtively first picked it up).
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