You give love a
bad name

>> Cold hearts rule in Jeffrey Eugenides
collection My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead:
Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Juliet Waters

Harold Brodkey’s classic short story “First Love and Other Sorrows” opens with an atmosphere that will feel familiar to many: “…slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long.” For some reason, it’s especially during this time, which foreshadows the dreary death that awaits most of us, that love seems like such a good idea. This must be the evolutionary biologist’s explanation for Valentine’s Day.

As Jeffrey Eugenides points out in the introduction to My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro, “Evolutionary biology does away with love completely, finding in the novelist’s most dependable material—adultery and divorce—nothing more than a hardwired imperative to pass genes along to the next generation. Sexologists see only a chemical state of infatuation that lasts a couple of years, transforming thereafter, among even the most well-matched couples, into the bath-towelly togetherness known as pair-bonding.”

Perhaps you’ve picked up, or been harangued into picking up, one bath towel too many, and think a collection of love stories should be the last thing on your reading list. Too bad.

Eugenides continues: “When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler… the happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.”

My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, which Eugenides edited, may lose him more than a few fans recently acquired as an Oprah book club pick for Middlesex. Dave Eggers (called here “The Bono of Lit”) commissioned the collection as a fundraising project for a teenage literacy project. The humanitarian aims of this book might be uplifting, but the thematic aims seem to be manifestly brutal.

More often than not, love is, or isn’t, in the sordid worlds created by Denis Johnson in “Dirty Wedding,” Miranda July in “Something That Needs Nothing,” and David Bezmozgis in “Natasha”; or the wistful worlds of Lorrie Moore’s “How To Be An Other Woman,” Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog,” and Nabakov’s “Spring in Fialta”; and in the complex resonant pain of Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (the inspiration for Sarah Polley’s Away From Her), Deborah Eisenberg’s “Some Other, Better Otto” and Raymond Carver’s immortal “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

Classics, like Joyce’s “The Dead,” are mixed in with the more recently written, like Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t.” While “Red Rose, White Rose” by Eileen Chang, though first published in 1947, holds promise that there may be a treasure trove of exquisite and torturous Chinese love stories just waiting to be translated.

But there are the lighthearted exceptions. Grace Paley’s three-page masterpiece, “Love,” gleefully explores the bitterness between a writer and her husband, who stubbornly lists Dotty Wasserman, one of her fictional characters, as his former lover. He claims, convincingly, that expecting her to believe that he had an affair with Dotty is no less absurd than being expected to believe that she hasn’t had affairs with her fictional male characters.

George Saunders’s “Jon” is a story about two teenagers trying to escape a dystopic world where they are kept hooked up to Sims-like virtual realities and neurofeedback machines as a form of consciousness control. It’s dark, but there’s a loopiness that somehow hints that they may one day find a reality outside the only one they’ve ever known, “where the moon frowns down at this dude due to he is hiding in his barn eating Rebel CornBells instead of proclaiming his SnackLove aloud.”

Odds are it’s a reality much like the one in these stories, which may, but probably won’t, offer hope.

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, ed. Jeffrey
Eugenides, HarperCollins, hc, 587PP, $26.95