Love Letters Another Marvelous Thing

By Melvin Maddocks

Laurie Colwin is a writer in love with writing about love. After six books, including her delicate little lyric of a novel, Happy All the Time, she remains as exclusive to her theme as a troubadour and as mordant as a jester.

In the connected short stories of Another Marvelous Thing, she has once again bittersweetly doomed her lovers to live out their liaison as if it were an endless Valentine's Day. Frank is an investment banker turned consultant with a wife and two grown sons. Billy is a considerably younger economic historian with a husband who works for a think tank. But what these two do, and who they are, could hardly matter less. Frank and Billy are employees in Colwin's full-time business: love.

Love may well be life's most blinding obsession, but Colwin is so obsessed with her subject that for the first six of her eight stories she actually neglects the players. Flesh fades before wordplay as he, elegant in his tweed coat and paisley scarf, embraces her, a slob in worn corduroys and ratty sweater, on the way to the frowsy couch in Billy's study. Readers can scarcely hear Billy's battered loafers thud to the floor for the detonations of insights and definitions.

The first kiss, it seems, is a "one-celled organism" that evolves "into something rather grander--a bird of paradise, for example." Falling in love involves "a kind of inward lurch," as if one "were having a dream about falling off a ledge." Adultery, despite its dazzle and heat, gets polished off as "limited doting, restricted thrall."

Colwin's prevailing theory--that love is at best a paradox--leads her to a symmetry as incongruously formal as a minuet played backward. Frank and his wife are perfectly partnered in their taste for English cars, Early American sideboards, houses in the South of France and dressy parties. Billy and her husband are a matching pair in their indifference to all of the above. It is the adulterers who are incompatible, an irony at once deliciously comic and far too tidy. When the lovers finally sneak off to an idyllic week in a Vermont cottage, subsisting on passion and toasted cheese in bed, the reader feels the burned crumbs far more palpably than what Billy, in her carefully bored monotone, calls "the rapturous consummation." Frank concludes, "Were we to cohabit, I believe I would be driven nuts and she would come to loathe me." By contrast, marriage looks positively seductive. Were this antic reversal all, Colwin could be categorized as an antiromantic romantic, half in love with the dreams she punctures. But the author, despite her subject and style, is that rarest of modern artists, a moralist.

After Billy ends the affair-- to borrow from Colwin's belatedly accurate title--a marvelous thing happens. "You're my child substitute," Billy had told her lover. Now she gives birth to a son, replacing metaphor with life. Love, no longer a dance, no longer a word game, connects to the rest of life and death and takes on the weight of destiny. As the blood flows, bringing little William into the world, Colwin does not abandon her chosen theme; she movingly fulfills it.