The Book of Love by Kelly Link. | Random House
The first novel by the acclaimed short-story writer is magical, strange, and just a tad too slow.
The Book of Love, Kelly Link’s first novel, is a love story, yes. It’s also a ghost story, and a coming-of-age story, and a portrait of a small town. It’s about magic and music and morality. It’s about how annoying siblings are, and how much you need them. It is a book that contains many books, that is bigger than the sum of its many parts. It is also, perhaps, a book that should have been a touch smaller.
The Book of Love begins with three teenagers back from the dead: Type A Laura, eternal elder brother Daniel, inquisitive Mo. They have been in some strange limbo, “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness,” for almost a year. They can’t remember how they died. They don’t understand how they happened to come back.
Their old music teacher, the enigmatic Mr. Anabin, seems to have some answers, but he’s not willing to tell them much. Instead, he puts them through a series of trials, informing them that if they don’t complete their tasks successfully, they will doubtless find themselves back in limbo. Helpfully, Mr. Anabin also enchants all the revenants’ friends and families so that they believe them to have been studying abroad instead of dead — although Susannah, Laura’s rebellious sister and Daniel’s ex-girlfriend, seems to cherish some suspicions despite all the magic.
The mystery of what happened to the three teenagers provides Link with the skeleton of a plot, but she is almost palpably uninterested in solving it. Link, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and Pulitzer finalist for her short stories, seems to be most invested in atmosphere and character work, and she’s developed an ideal showcase for both skills with her setting for The Book of Love: the small town of Lovesend.
Lovesend is a seaside town in Massachusetts. The local club is built out of a plane hangar on the cliffs made iconic for its indoor carousel; the food is mediocre. The coffee shop is called What Hast Thou Ground, and its owner has a policy of cultivating good coffee and a bad atmosphere so people don’t linger too long. Music always seems to be playing somewhere, as though Lovesend is Prospero’s Island. The place is already a little strange, a little unearthly, long before magic arrives.
After that, statues start climbing off their plinths and walking around and people start climbing onto the plinths and turning into statues. There’s a boy who turns into moths and seagulls. There’s a cat who, grooming itself, begins to swallow its leg, and then keeps going, swallowing its whole body until it has swallowed even its smile, “rosy wet gullet snapping together like a fanged coin purse,” a kind of nightmarishly fleshy Cheshire Cat.
As wonders and horrors fight their way across the page, Link moves from character to character. Each chapter of this novel is given an almost biblical “book of” title — The Book of Laura, the Book of Susannah, the Book of Lovesend. The bulk of the novel is given over to the book of the main characters, but Link periodically turns the pages to the books of some of the other citizens of Lovesend, like a man who’s been turned into a tiger or a teen lesbian on whom Laura is madly crushing.
Most beautiful and effective of all is The Book of Maryanne, Mo’s grandmother, a rushing kaleidoscope of a chapter that follows Maryanne throughout her life. We see her early career as a Black romance novelist writing white heroines under a pen name, her successes and her failures, the loss of her daughter and the arrival of Mo. “Time,” thinks Maryanne, “is a row of small and hateful stitches.”
It’s hard not to think, looking at The Book of Maryanne, of a very brief and strange and beautiful short story, the kind at which Link excels. She’s been writing for decades now, but The Book of Love is her first novel. Chapters like The Book of Maryanne make me wonder if The Book of Love would not have felt a little more beautiful and more magical as a novel in stories rather than the sprawling 625-page saga Link has delivered us. Occasionally, you feel a little stab of discomfort with the form as you go.
This is a slow-moving book. It takes 89 pages for Mo, Laura, and Daniel to make their way through their first night back from the dead, and 125 pages after that for a single character to discover any answers about the central mysteries. Then that character promptly gets their memory magically revised, a move Link repeats so often that it starts to feel almost comical.
At times the slow place works as a way of exploring this richly textured small town, these deeply realized love stories. At other times it feels willfully slow, information withheld for no reason until it becomes time for exposition to be dumped inelegantly onto the page. For a writer of Link’s gifts, such clumsiness is jarring. If you’re new to Link’s work, it might be worth checking out her intricate and twisting short stories, a form over which she has full mastery, before you come to this odd novel.
Nonetheless, Link’s gifts are fairly extraordinary on their own. If The Book of Love is flawed, it’s also something strange and beautiful and shimmering.