SOURCE: Furbank, P. N. “Marshmallowing.” New York Review of Books (13 January 1994): 35.

In the following review, Furbank discusses the genre and unifying thematic concerns of On Love.

On Love is a first novel by a young writer living in London who has had the bright idea of tracing the course of an “ordinary” love affair—initial conflagration, ecstasies, domesticities, break-up, suicide attempt, beginning of new cycle, with new lover—breaking it up into numbered paragraphs (as in Wittgenstein's Tractatus) and enclosing it in a dense network of cultural allusions. Dante Flaubert, and Proust are at hand, but more pervasively the currently fashionable literary theorists and postmodernists: Saussure, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Heidegger.

The restaurant was of no help, for its romantic setting made love too conspicuous, hence insincere. The romantic weakened the bond between authorial intent and language, the signifieds kept threatening infidelity.

Intimacy did not destroy the self...