Whitney, My Love

I just finished Judith McNaught's "Whitney, My Love" last night and I have to say that I found the experience fairly disturbing. In its favor, the book reads as solid, if unimaginative, prose with good characterizations. It's extremely absorbing as well; I read the first three hundred pages in one sitting. However, finishing the book later that night, I was left with a sense of great insecurity and doubt about love, not the emotions that a romance novel is supposed to elicit. If as Jayne Ann Krentz famously stated, romance novels are ones in which "the answer is always yes," then "Whitney, My Love" might in fact have been ascribed to entirely the wrong genre. More than anything, it seems to dwell on the fragility of love, the instability of romantic relationships which constantly teeter on the brink of hate and lust (here seen as entirely negative). Here, the answer the characters get is not a "yes," but a perpetual "maybe."

This novel can clearly be seen to follow the genre of "oppositional romance" created most famously by Jane Austen in "Pride and Prejudice." Just like P&P, it has a male and female lead who frequently despise each other and yet are manifestly destined to be together. In P&P, the conflict between the two leads provides the main narrative thrust, culiminating in a joyous denouement in which all ambiguity and misinterpretation have been cleared away. "Whitney" seems to wish to imitate this model, and yet the book diverges from it in many significant ways. The type of emotional growth and maturity demonstrated by Darcy and Elizabeth over the course of the novel is lacking here. Whitney might hate the Duke when she originally meets him, but she apparently hates him just as much four hundred pages later when she believes him to have broken their engagement, despite intervening declarations of affection.

Both main characters of the novel are able to go for long stretches of time believing themselves deeply in love with the other and then, upon some mistaken revelation, reverse entirely and deny all previous emotion. They allow the present to cancel out all the past they have built together and that is, or at the very least should be, inexcusable in a romance novel. Here, love lacks all constancy. The characters are repeatedly quick to believe the worst of each other and to act on that misapprehension. Circumstances may align to bring those misunderstandings to a point of clarity and thus facilitate reconciliation, yet the very arbitrary nature of the resolution itself highlights the lack of trust which necessitated its implementation within the narrative.

It is almost absurd to imagine, within some post-denouement future, Darcy repudiating Elizabeth after discovering yet another abhorrent relation. Or on the contrary, Elizabeth invalidating her affection upon recieving a cold look or word from her husband. And yet, McNaught allows her leads to do just that, to erase all claims of love based on a rumor, a scrap of paper, an ill-timed letter. And, she does this not just once, but four or five times, building layers of insecurity and doubt upon what the reader is meant to envision as a marriage. For McNaught, love itself, without intervention, does not pervail or survive (particularly for the man); thus, any happy ending is automatically overshadowed by the ephemarality and romantic inauthenticity of that conclusion.

This wouldn't be quite so disturbing if McNaught wasn't percieved as one of the direct and most important literary heirs of Austen and Heyer within the genre. As the first modern writer to take up the mantle of historical regency, her conclusions seem to take on a greater weight, to speak for our era in the face of earlier generations. Yet, what she says speaks only to a cynicism and a blatant distrust of affection which, if valid, should shame us all.

Thoughts on "The History of Love"

I have difficulty deciding if The History of Love functions best as an affirmation or inditement of romantic love. Perhaps, in a particularly disturbing way, it does both. Love is seen as the raison d'etre of many of the adult main characters and yet, it also debilitates and permanently maims them. Alma's mother and Leo Gursky, the two adults most central to the story (ignoring Zvi Lvitinof for the moment), each seem to be unceasingly drowning in their own love. Their emotion has lost its object and yet the emotion itself traps them. By the time Leo Gursky loses his family to the Nazis, he had already lost something of himself that he is simply never capable of getting back. The novel seems to warn of the danger of putting a human being at the center of your world. The characters circle as satellites around a beloved who inevitably disappears; lost, bewildered, they orbit still, unable to replace that center or willing to live independent of it. At one point in their lives, Leo Gursky and Charlotte Singer each created a definition of themselves and their place in the world that had another human at its heart. Now, alone, they live with memories and rob themselves of the possibility of further life. This is wrenchingly romantic, true, but it also a terrible, heartbreaking waste, leaving the reader crying not so much for the lost love as for the lost life.

Thus, the final ambiguity left in Alma's relationship with her friend Misha seems both intentional and salvatory for the reader. She feels herself falling in love and fighting it at the same time. And at least, we don't have to see her fall. Alma is preserved by her indecision, saved for the space of the book, and thus forever in the imagination of the reader, from the descent into love/obsession that haunts her elders. Human life is transitory, human relationships even more so. And yet, for Krause and her characters the ephemerality of every type of relationship only serves to highlight love's centrality. The Holocaust is thus an ideal backdrop for the story. It allows Krause to play with a character madly in love, who has lost every human being capable of stirring emotion within him. His choice to "live" as a hollow satellite of the people he loved from the past seems like an ultimate rejection of life. Leo Gursky has centered his life around loving the dead or unattainable. The reader is torn with the aching, sad waste of such a pursuit, the emptiness vacancy that spans a life stole from the teeth of Hitler's murderers. Among all the dead, he alone has a chance to live and chooses to spend it loving a vacuum. And yet, looking at the issues the opposite way, if love is the most powerful form of remembering, of recreating the vanished beloved, then people like Leo Gursky and Alma's mother are also fighting waste, preserving love despite the destruction of human life.

I don't really have an answer on this. Reading back to the very beginning of the book, it seems that perhaps Nicole Krauss thinks she does. She refers to her husband as her life, the same phrase that Gursky uses for his Alma. So, perhaps, we as readers are meant to embrace the romance and value it over the simultaneous, inseparable emptiness experienced by the characters. Krause has presented a picture of love with loneliness and loss always only briefly held at bay, a love that is a denial of both life and death. Perhaps as Alma wonders, such love is simply too much, as she silently begs her mother, "Love me less."(pg. 43) And yet, neither Alma nor the reader can turn away from it. Maybe the only message we are meant to take away from the book is that no one in life, love, or death, ever really has a choice.