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| Love, in Theory: Ten Stories
ISBN: 9780820344737
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Georgia Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Lesbians -- Fiction;
Love and loss are as one in Levy's series of short stories, which weave a tapestry of overlapping vignettes from the lives of various couples. Separately, the stories chronicle a point in time for a cast of characters of varying ages, sexual orientations, faiths-but each story deals with love in some form. Together, small details and familiar personalities blur the edges of the stories to form a multifaceted view of one set of circumstances. A master of his form, Levy gradually reveals the consonance in his stories until it becomes clear that the abandonment Renee feels when her lover leaves her for an ashram in "Theory of Enlightenment" is replicated in "Theory of Transportation," in which the narrator's lover leaves to become a monk, and throughout every story. Mirroring the many personas of an individual in love, the collection -both implicitly in its overall structure and explicitly in one of the stories, pays homage to Roland Barthe's A Lover's Discourse. This melancholy collection's multitude of literary references becomes old, though they facilitate a deeper understanding of the characters. Levy is skilled at bringing his characters to life, each story searingly made real through his subtlety and fastidious attention to detail. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
E. J. LEVY's work has appeared in the Paris Review , the Missouri Review , Gettysburg Review , the New York Times , and Best American Essays and has received a Pushcart Prize and Nelson Algren Finalist Award among other honors. She is also the author of the memoir Amazons: A Love Story and editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers , which won the Lambda Literary Award. Levy teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University. |
