Myths of Love: New American Fiction

Departing as Air by Allen Wier. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 203 pages. $14.95.
The Summoning by Robert Towers. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. 336 pages. $15.95.
Oral History by Lee Smith. New York: Putnam, 1983. 286 pages. $14.95.
The Good Son by Craig Nova. New York: Delacorte Press. 436 pages. $15.95.

The myth of love, in its pop forms, is a bedroom farce which concludes in bubbly happiness unaware of the horrors that stalk us in the world. In art’s more severe consciousness, the myth shows us lost to the world, unsheathed as razors, actors in a repeated tragedy with personal, familial, and historical costs: one Anthony and Cleopatra shakes the shape of all human time and experience. The myth is always the same—our oldest, most seductive, most dangerous dream. Or nightmare—since, as the myths warn us, love uncontrolled means a power unleashed, a formless, engulfing energy. That is why we fall in love, just as a man slips into a river by chance. When he has done that it is useless, to him at any rate, to speak of morality, ethics, honor, shame, guilt, implicit carnages of the spirit, just as it is useless to remind him of social custom, conventions, rituals, taboos, laws which are merely humankind’s evolved defenses against the beast we always are. That one who has truly fallen has cancelled the ordinary covenants, those felt safeguards of our secure world, and has invoked the self-exile from which he must sooner or later return and for which he will suffer the vengeance of the tribe.