Your Love Is Not Good

Review

What a weird book! I spent the first 50 pages wondering, “Am I going to hate this?” My hackles were raised by the Lispector quote; I tried to read Apple in the Dark some months ago and found it absolutely grueling and couldn’t finish. But I found this quite readable!

Mechanically, the writing is serviceable but not amazing. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and sounds sort of rigid. Then again, I think our characters are pretty strange people, and for some of them, I think they would speak like this to appear more sophisticated than they actually are. So, I’m willing to go with some of the very strange dialogue. Someone in our book club pointed out that the italic usage is odd, and I didn’t notice this so much until the ending 40 pages or so (which I read after the book club). There are definitely some strange empresses. All that said, I never bumped on the writing like I sometimes do, it all flowed rather nicely. I found it very readable and often enjoyed reading it, even if I was not at all enjoying the characters’ decisions or actions.

Speaking of characters, our narrator is basically nuts. As the book progresses, she is clearly falling into a deeper and deeper mental health crisis. I started googling if certain medical conditions have psychosis symptoms, because the character demonstrates some of these symptoms at times. Her behavior is also absolutely unacceptable, often. She sexually assaults a fan, she more or less imprisons someone… Not great! Her interior thoughts are quite unpleasant and she has not an ounce of insight. She has clearly been traumatized and abused growing up, and is now spreading that abuse to many of the people in her life. She sometimes seems to suggest she’s doing this to hurt herself, but that does not romanticize anything. There are plenty of ways to hurt yourself that don’t involve sexually assaulting someone.

None of that is to say the book is bad, I enjoyed it! Always good to get an idea of what someone even more mentally ill might have going on in their head. But also, as a few folks in the book club shared, I read this as a satire. There are times when I could understand a person not doing this, but in the last part of the book, an artist is at a party telling a story about being in a shitty cabin while reading Infinite Jest. Talk about insufferable, was he the most boring person at the party? I groaned out loud when I read this, it is such a stereotype. A lot of the more clearly satirical pieces got chuckles out of me, and that’s just what I could glean as a non-artist with no exposure to the art world.

An aside: I found the texting very strange. The author writes descriptions of emojis and identifies user interface actions in all caps (SEND, DELETE). Weird! But what would be weirder, the actual emoji on screen? I have no idea! Texting and e-mail are huge parts of our lives and communication, and we make decisions about what to type, thinking of how they will be received. My all time favorite New Republic article is from 2011, “The Period is Pissed,” and is about this and the generational rifts it can expose: https://newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-punctuation-mark-has-become-sign-anger. It’s rare that I use emoji in texts, but I use a lot of !!!! in e-mails at work, they all translate to: “I AM NOT ANGRY, I AM NOT A MEAN PERSON!” I found this pretty interesting, honestly probably moreso than it deserved.

It’s a weird book, and I can’t think of anyone I’d recommend it to, but I also wouldn’t dis-recommend it. I had a good time reading it, and the parts that are clearly supposed to be off-putting and disturbing succeed at being so. A classic tale of pretty enjoyable book full of absolutely horrible characters. I can see how some folks wouldn’t like that, but I have never needed to love a character to read through them. If this is something you do need, I would say (and hope) that this book may not appeal.

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Second aside: this book has blurbs about it being queer, but I did not find it especially so. Yes, several (nearly all) of the characters are various flavours of queer, as I am. But does that make a book queer? The goodreads description talks about the narrator not knowing if she wants to be or consume (which I take to mean, ‘fuck’) Hanne. This is DEFINITELY very queer, not knowing whether you want to be the person you’re enchanted by, sleep with them, be friends with them, or more and everything. That, I would say, is quintessentially queer. But I don’t find this to be the major object of the book. While our narrator is clearly obsessed with Hanne, I at no point feel the specific queer confusion that the blurb describes, within our narrator. I feel the narrator is confused and conflicted about themselves, and is filtering a lot of that confusion and frustration through the obsession. Is that queer? Maybe! I don’t know. But if I were to put this on my bookshelf, would I put it in the “queer” section (which exists!), just because the narrator is queer? I guess I probably would? That’s what I did with ASG’s Less and my Isherwood books, Mark Hyatt’s Love, Leda, and Philippe Besson’s works. Is that right? I’ve got no idea. Would I have given this a second thought if these characters had dicks and were gay instead of having vaginas and being bi? I should reflect on that.

Notes

p94 - How to describe her? I tapped the blond queen emoji, then swiped to the emoji of the hole. SEND.

p146 - I saw myself as though from far away, standing in the room of my paintings, her face and body everywhere, eight huge canvases, as if the walls of my inner theater had been cut open and bled out. I was flayed for the whole city to see, me and my work, here it is, my desire for you, come see, look at it, it’s for you, you, you.

p154 - To be deciphered. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. No, I’ve wanted most of all for y deciphering to be needed, for someone to need to do it, and for its discovery to reveal the other to themselves, that we need this to be who we are.

p155-158 - TB: There is a scene here that is sort of crucial to the book but also never revisited and there seem to never be consequences. A few segments: It’s that, by trying to ruin her, I shall ruin myself. I am teaching her, teaching both of us. … I want to make her cry because I want to help her, I want to give her what she wants. … “Let me look at you,” I say. She has the body of a young boy. “You look like a boy” I say. … She nods. I see that she is confused. Good. We’re in this together … “Am I the one who has hurt you the most?” I shout. “I’m the one who has hurt you the most!” Of all of the narrator’s bad behavior, and there’s a lot of it, this is the worst. She encounters a young fan at an event, lies about taking her to a party only to take her home, insults and undermines the girl, and assaults her. There is not a single thing redeeming here, it is terrible. This is probably the best example of her love being “not good” – though I would not say this is in even the same universe as love. This is a textbook image of an assaulted and traumatize person doing the same to another person, passing it on. That doesn’t make it acceptable or any less horrific. The narrator is a mess and hurting other people left and right because she can’t be bothered to cool it.

p239-240 - There is an aim with love, a telos, what is love but a kind of intention driven by the force of its aim, but meaning is slippery, it has no end, it looses itself into the world but keeps slicing into you. TB: The author reportedly considers this, particularly the last “meaning is slippery” part, to be the thesis of the book.

p243-244 - The voice yelled after me, “I can see your love is not good! Your love is not good!” … Did she mean I was doing my love wrong, or that what was not good was who I had chosen to love? TB: Narrator’s total lack of consideration for any other explanation for this statement demonstrates a huge lack of insight. At least it is consistent with the character, who is never insightful. My interpretation of the street psychic’s statement is that the narrator’s love literally not good, is destructive, harmful. This we see repeatedly in the story. There is an argument to be made, though, that the narrator never actually expresses or even experiences love, but rather: enmeshment, dependency, obsession, and most of all, narcissistic exploitation.

p272 - “Why are you so afraid?” TB: Another example of manipulation, actively prodding someone to get them to do something they don’t want to do. BAD PERSON!

p293 - TB: Artist telling a story about living in a shit cabin while reading Infinite Jest. If you weren’t sure if this was a satire, surely this gives it away! I groaned out loud reading this passage.

p296 - “Because I understand you better than you understand yourself.” TB: RUN AWAY FROM THIS PERSON!