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In great novels we always feel that the writer, at the time of the writing, knows as much as anyone around can know, and is struggling to make sense of what is perceived somewhere in the nerve endings if not yet in clarified consciousness. When a novel gives us less than many of us know -- and is c…

A couple of years ago, at dinner with a couple I've known for year -- she is an academic, she a poet; he makes the money, she does not -- I fell into some aimless exchange about marriage, in the middle of which the husband had occasion to announce casually, "Of course, it's a given that the one who…

[...] When Emma Bovary was loosening her stays with a man other than her husband, or Anna Karenina running away from hers, or Newbold Archer agonizing over whether to leave New York with Ellen Olenska, people were indeed risking all for love. Bourgeois respectability had the power to make of these …

The genius of the narrative lies in the desperate calm with which the husband charts the weeks and months of unhappy suspicion, all the while a piece of unwanted knowledge is collecting steadily in him. "I am thirty-five years old," he tells us in the middle of his story, "and it seems to me that I…

The despair of these writers can never be as moving to a reader like me as it is to the writers themselves. At the heart of their work lies a keen regret that things are no longer as they once were between men and women, a regret so intense that it amounts to longing. It's this longing, endowed wit…