Review: Love's Work

Love's Work by Gillian Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about Rose’s Love’s Work, upon which I cogitated in a knot of frown but could not unlock my brow—a hard, seedless nut; a water-scented perfume; a come-hither from the mirror—such unavailing tantilisation that when I finally cracked the charade, the answser is charade.

This semi-biography semi-treatise is overwritten, like a warning sign turned to a litany. The language can be overbearing and pretentiously abstruse—she tried too hard to hide a plain truth, amping up the expectation and toning down the fun of it. The book is a loosely-structured, thinly-sheafed dichotomy of personal life and philosophical musings. I use the word dichotomy advisedly yet under a dramatic light, as her reflection on life and death and love (which I find too broad and ancient a theme for this puny memoir to master) is indeed periodically spliced by framments of past life; however, the link between the two is not gravitational, which would not be a constitutional defect if dotted with occasional clues for someone as obtruse as me to pick up. I distinguish Rose’s intention to sow as many bedside thoughts as possibly could be managed, but as she tried to scrunch a wide compass of meaning into one withered palm, the stories she told must be short but not necessarily sweet, her painting of family and friends efficient but not necessariy affecting, her rambling musings on life affairs dense, not necessarily clear. I’m of the opinion that elongated, or biforcated, the book would show more potential.

Rose's biographical recount dwells upon snippets of what frames and releases her throughout her tumultous existence. These uncommon happenings, however, fall commonly flat in comparison with other memoirs and autobiographies that I have read: her initiation to the realm of philosophy aroused in me the same interest as I read Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, and her flamboyant, roguish academic friends from New York would fit in perfectly well in Patti Smith’s Just Kids. And the characters (including Rose herself), spared more ink, would make an emotive ensemble instead of a piteously lifeless tableau.

As regards the intermittent contemplations that threaten the yawning of a misplaced student, nothing short of spectacular in gilding her thinking but what is gilded is not all roses. At best, the decoded message rewards me with a refill of something unexciting yet nourishing; at worse it strips me of any further appetite like a covered yet empty plate.

Lover and Beloved are equally at the mercy of emotions which each fears will overwhelm and destroy their singularity. For the Lover, these are the frightening feelings roused by the love: for the Beloved, these are the frightening feelings trusted to love, but now sent back against her.

I am no puritan for lapidary writing but these sentences might be encapsuled: power is to Lover what powerless is to Beloved in love’s undoing. Much as I adore a run-on carthasis, some of her passage-length arguments deliver, cumbrously, a simple point, meeting no particular end, whether it be nods or nays. These comparatively copious pages of her musings make me lament the willowy, underdevelopped moments that with a tad more stuffing, would add more to the book.

Notwithstanding my smouldering rants, I have to say there are some parts I did enjoy, which is why I grieve the book’s unfledgedness. Such as:

Comedy is homeopathic: it cures folly by folly.

Hands no longer marvel at the beauty of hands: they cease to stroke, slowly, repeatedly, the long, speechful fingers; her hands can no longer reach their short, maladroit, childlike friends. Palm no longer paddles in palm, kissing with inside lip.

See how a thimbleful of easy, homely vocabulary gins up her brewing? With no view of aggrandizing and intellectualizing, she is at her best and in her truest self, and I love this lightness, which regrettably, she, miserly, ekes out in her habit of composing the gravitas proper of a scholar.

And I adore this trivial depiction when she, hospitalised for cancer, expects a visit from the nurses:

“Nurse is coming,” croons the loudspeaker system, on the patient’s request for assistance. A multiple female beast, with millions of eyes and heads and breasts and arms and good intentions, is invoked by this collective noun.

The genius of this scene is the juxtaposition of a mob of brute-like care-takers (accentuation of body parts rendering them perversely faceless rather than human) and (an ironic twist of) their good intentions. I suppose Sylvia Plath, in her white, hushed ward, might have darted the same, baleful eye towards these ‘‘exterminating angels.’’ The representation of this small event is affecting yet callous, thus infinitely funny. Rose’s mistrust towards the common, medical take on death, and her impulse to question and rebuke from an argumentative nature lie open here to be registered, or passed by—I don’t think she cares much, since her wish is to ‘‘pass unnoticed’’ in her dotage.

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