Love is strange,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, citing the 1956 Mickey and Sylvia hit single, in his 1988 New York Times review of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” As we get older, he continued, “we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teenage pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.”
This sort of marginalization of love stories — that, for one thing, they don’t qualify as “legitimate” novels — threads through the 125 years of The New York Times Book Review. And yet there are lessons to be learned about the necessary ingredients for a good love story from even these sorts of condescensions — along with the review that took them more seriously,
of course. And not just romantic love, but love writ large: familial, platonic, universal, and so on. Perhaps, in a way, all stories are love stories, at least in part. Here are nine of those ingredients, as gleaned from the pages of the Book Review.
Tell us: What makes for a great love story?
1. Heroes (or Antiheroes)
‘He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest.’ — ‘Funeral Blues,’ by W.H. Auden
It all begins with protagonists and those who surround them. An 1898 discussion of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” inspired a mash note — one celebrating both Austen and her book’s lead, Elizabeth Bennet, among others — from a self-described “elderly” reader.
