Love, Again ~ Doris Lessing
So you think you're in love. But the person you think you love is in love with someone else. And that person loves someone else, and they love someone else who loves someone else, who loves someone else, who loves someone else. And if somebody thinks they love you? Well, it feels like a cruel joke, and how dare they?
I wish I had more to say about this story. I suppose it taught me not to go into a book with expectations, in this case that I was entering a love story full of sex and passion and hope. Until the very end, I was waiting for somebody to get some action, but all I found was longing and despair, and that which I could hardly believe from the characters. Dry, crumby exposition about the hopelessness of love. Self loathing. Inertia. There were layers that I liked; a subplot of a delinquent niece, for one, and a musical theatre rendition of a 19th century suicide. But I felt the narrative was pretty flat. These characters are on the brink of destruction, yet they seem like they're all talk. I couldn't feel what they were feeling.
This isn't to say I didn't like it. I did.