SOURCE: McDowell, Deborah E. “Philosophy of the Heart.” Women's Review of Books 21, no. 3 (December 2003): 8-9.

In the following review, McDowell discusses the theme of love in Morrison's Love.

What is this thing called love that cannot stand alone, but depends on modifiers and conjunctions to complete it, to give it heft and meaning? There is “brotherly” love, “platonic” love, “puppy” love, “courtly” love, and of course, that most vexing, confounding, ever-elusive “romantic” love. Love often shows up in common parlance with a partner, as in love and death, love and lust, love and hate, love and war, and that reverent, consecrated pairing, love and marriage, which “go together like a horse and carriage,” in the words of the popular ditty ending with the rhyming couplet, “This I tell you brother, you can't have one without the other.” We know, of course, that we can and more often do...