The course of love A novel

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Rabih and Kirsten meet, fall in love with one another's wonderful peculiarities, marry, buy a house, and have kids, yet this is no run-of-the-mill love story. All throughout, a philosopher interrupts the narrative to tell readers what's going on below the surface. We often wonder about couples: How did they meet, and what challenges did they face in coming together? But through this couple and the anonymous philosopher, the always-intriguing de Botton, who returns to fiction after 20 years and numerous nonfiction books, aims to answer the question, What is it like to be married for a while? The answers are often funny but also quite moving, thought-provoking, forgiving, and drenched in truth. Through the philosopher's interjections, the unsayable can be said: we are all, occasionally, terribly unlovable; we'd do well to consider the inner child informing our adult selves; and love is much more work and effort than prevailing, capital-R Romantic ideals ever lead us to believe. In the end, de Botton's subjects are weathered heroes. It takes a certain literary sensibility to appreciate de Botton's untraditional narrative, but those who do will be fascinated by Rabih and Kirsten's charming and difficult life. Prime material for book groups.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestselling philosopher de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life), whose nonfiction tackles life's big questions, traces the intricate and winding path of a long-term relationship in his second novel. Rabih Khan, from Beirut, and Kirsten McClelland, from Scotland, meet and fall in love. De Botton outlines the contours of a love that endures yet inevitably evolves over the years, through Rabih's sudden proposal, the birth of their two children, and the act and consequences of adultery. The story of Rabih and Kirsten is interspersed-on almost every page-with de Botton's italicized manifesto of universal truths about love and romance, such as "Love is a search for completion." As readers watch Rabih and Kirsten work, fight, make love, and take risks, de Botton does something interesting: he will rewind a scene, usually an argument, and play it again to illustrate how loving, mature people should react, rather than how they typically do. At points, de Botton seems distant from his characters, as if they were created to illustrate his beliefs about love. But when Rabih and Kirsten are debating the details of petty humiliations and letdowns, they feel completely alive and real. The novel is a valuable commentary on the state of modern marriage and it reassures us that troubles are a normal, even necessary, part of the journey. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

More treatise than novel, this book takes a forensic approach to marriage. De Botton, a Swiss-born intellectual and TED-talker who lives in London, has long been preoccupied with human weakness, offering tips to overcome it. Via such nonfiction hybrids as How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006), he has charmed and edified millions of readers. Now de Botton circles back to fictionhis only previous novel, On Love (1993), pondered the custom of falling in and out of lovewith the story of a marriage. He presents a case study of a "Scottish wife and her Middle Eastern husband," one Kirsten McLelland and Rabih Khan. The author sums up his plot on Page 16: "They will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair..."; he has no interest in quotidian suspense. De Botton supplies some nice insights on kindness and can certainly turn a phrase"there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry"but he makes this story a slog. He punctuates it with long, italicized paragraphs of psychologizing, some of it banal and some of it poppycock. It's as if a fussy uncle has hijacked one's reading. Without naming him, de Botton leans heavily on Freud, depicting his couple as stymied by childhood traumas (her father abandons her; his mother dies) and infantile longings. The straw men here are "Romanticism" and sexual fidelity, which de Botton seems to find equally absurd. (Rabih, a middling architect, does a lot of whining about monogamy.) There is a reason the heart on the book's cover is black, although Kirsten and Rabih seem to do a better job than most: "It's the sticking around that is the weird and exotic achievement." A philosopher of the everyday can't help but write marriage as a primer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Course of Love Infatuations The hotel is on a rocky outcrop, half an hour east of Málaga. It has been designed for families and inadvertently reveals, especially at mealtimes, the challenges of being part of one. Rabih Khan is fifteen and on holiday with his father and stepmother. The atmosphere among them is somber and the conversation halting. It has been three years since Rabih's mother died. A buffet is laid out every day on a terrace overlooking the pool. Occasionally his stepmother remarks on the paella or the wind, which has been blowing intensely from the south. She is originally from Gloucestershire and likes to garden. A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soul mate. Rabih first sees the girl by the water slide. She is about a year younger than him, with chestnut hair cut short like a boy's, olive skin, and slender limbs. She is wearing a striped sailor top, blue shorts, and a pair of lemon-yellow flip-flops. There's a thin leather band around her right wrist. She glances over at him, pulls what may be a halfhearted smile, and rearranges herself on her deck chair. For the next few hours she looks pensively out to sea, listening to her Walkman and, at intervals, biting her nails. Her parents are on either side of her, her mother paging through a copy of Elle and her father reading a Len Deighton novel in French. As Rabih will later find out from the guest book, she is from Clermont-Ferrand and is called Alice Saure. He has never felt anything remotely like this before. The sensation overwhelms him from the first. It isn't dependent on words, which they will never exchange. It is as if he has in some way always known her, as if she holds out an answer to his very existence and, especially, to a zone of confused pain inside him. Over the coming days, he observes her from a distance around the hotel: at breakfast in a white dress with a floral hem, fetching a yogurt and a peach from the buffet; at the tennis court, apologizing to the coach for her backhand with touching politeness in heavily accented English; and on an (apparently) solitary walk around the perimeter of the golf course, stopping to look at cacti and hibiscus. It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soul mate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition, a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason. The infatuation crystallizes around a range of elements: a flip-flop hanging nonchalantly off a foot; a paperback of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha lying on a towel next to the sun cream; well-defined eyebrows; a distracted manner when answering her parents and a way of resting her cheek in her palm while taking small mouthfuls of chocolate mousse at the evening buffet. Instinctively he teases out an entire personality from the details. Looking up at the revolving wooden blades of the ceiling fan in his room, in his mind Rabih writes the story of his life with her. She will be melancholy and street-smart. She will confide in him and laugh at the hypocrisy of others. She will sometimes be anxious about parties and around other girls at school, symptoms of a sensitive and profound personality. She'll have been lonely and will never until now have taken anyone else into her full confidence. They'll sit on her bed playfully enlacing their fingers. She, too, won't ever have imagined that such a bond could be possible between two people. Then one morning, without warning, she is gone and a Dutch couple with two small boys are sitting at her table. She and her parents left the hotel at dawn to catch the Air France flight home, the manager explains. The whole incident is negligible. They are never to meet again. He tells no one. She is wholly untouched by his ruminations. Yet, if the story begins here, it is because--although so much about Rabih will alter and mature over the years--his understanding of love will for decades retain precisely the structure it first assumed at the Hotel Casa Al Sur in the summer of his sixteenth year. He will continue to trust in the possibility of rapid, wholehearted understanding and empathy between two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end to loneliness. He will experience similarly bittersweet longings for other lost soul mates spotted on buses, in the aisles of grocery stores, and in the reading rooms of libraries. He will have precisely the same feeling at the age of twenty, during a semester of study in Manhattan, about a woman seated to his left on the northbound C train; and at twenty-five in the architectural office in Berlin where he is doing work experience; and at twenty-nine on a flight between Paris and London after a brief conversation over the English Channel with a woman named Chloe: the feeling of having happened upon a long-lost missing part of his own self. For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The intensity may seem trivial--humorous, even--yet this reverence for instinct is not a minor planet within the cosmology of relationships. It is the underlying central sun around which contemporary ideals of love revolve. The Romantic faith must always have existed, but only in the past few centuries has it been judged anything more than an illness; only recently has the search for a soul mate been allowed to take on the status of something close to the purpose of life. An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects--an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, for it is no simple thing for any human being to honor over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office, or the adjoining airplane seat. It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic--wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates--are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm. Excerpted from The Course of Love: A Novel by Alain de Botton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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