Volume 27, Number 3 · March 6, 1980
It's Love!
By Thomas R. Edwards
Endless Love
by Scott Spencer
Knopf, 418 pp., $10.95
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
by Alice Munro
Knopf, 210 pp., $8.95
Black Tickets
by Jayne Anne Phillips
Delta, 265 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In spite of Richardson, Emily Brontë, or Lawrence, you would hardly know from reading most Anglo-American fiction that it's love that makes the world go round. For the Protestant imagination, passionate sexual desire needs to be satirized, sentimentalized, or domesticated, as if it were some severe but exotic disease which, properly isolated, needn't interfere with important concerns like money, politics, manly adventure, or social education. Now, even in a more lenient moral climate, we get lots of sexual performance but not much love. Most of the great love stories are still imports.
Review, 3109 words
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