SOURCE: Januzzi, Maria. Review of On Love by Alain de Botton. Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 2 (summer 1994): 224-25.

In the following review, Januzzi contends that On Love is an inconsistent novel.

“Trop penser me font amours—love makes me think too much,” sings a fifteenth-century troubadour in Roland Barthes's Fragments of a Lover's Discourse. Or, as the narrator of Alain de Botton's first novel [On Love] claims, “The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub.” In telling the story of his failed love affair with a woman named Chloe, the narrator quotes or alludes to Plato, Montaigne, Goethe, Marx, Proust, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Denis de Rougemont, and finally, the meta-beloved, Barthes himself. The particulars of the relationship, in the end, are far less vivid than its author's love affair with French literature and literary theory.

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