Book Review: 'Against Love: A Polemic'

DATE September 2, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

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Review: Laura Kipnis book "Against Love: A Polemic"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Although our book critic Maureen Corrigan has words of praise for the book
she's about to review, you may not want to give this book to your spouse or
lover. It's called "Against Love: A Polemic."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN reporting:

Do not bring this book along on family get-togethers. Do not bring it up at
dinner parties, picnics or soccer games, where other coupled adults
congregate. Quoting chunks of Laura Kipnis' new non-fiction book, "Against
Love," to a crowd of married grown-ups will provoke general laughter and
knowing nods followed by a round of hurt glances, sputtering defenses and
gloomy silences.

This book is trouble. Only adulterers, free lovers and sexually blithe
singletons will feel reassured after reading it. And the worst thing is
Kipnis is so convincing. "Against Love" is a vastly entertaining and smart
work of social criticism that wonders aloud about whether there could be forms
of daily life based upon something other than isolated households and sexually
exclusive couples.

She subtitles her book "A Polemic," which is an over-the-top form of
argumentation most famously employed in Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest
Proposal." That's the one where Swift suggests that the logical solution to
the Irish famines of the 18th century would be cannibalism. The power of a
polemic rests chiefly on a writer's gift for language, especially for
metaphor.

Kipnis demonstrates her brilliance at the form when she opens by describing
the married libido this way: `Once a well-known freedom fighter, now a sorry,
shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citizen, Janis Joplin to
Barry Manilow, in just a few short decades, all applicable organs pledged to
the couple as community property.'

Throughout "Against Love" Kipnis plays the part of a heretic in the chapel of
love, citing the well-known statistic that 50 percent of American marriages
fail, and nodding to the reality that hordes of married men and women stray.
She considers why Americans clearly harbor ambivalence and anxiety about
monogamy, a way of life we're all supposed to regard as natural. In this
light, she interprets the 1990s ruckus over philandering politicians,
everybody from Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton, as a kind of subconscious
strategy the nation adopted to act out its collective conflicts over marriage.

A running question throughout the book is this zinger: Is boredom socially
necessary? According to Kipnis, marriage and its attendant boredoms serve the
same purpose that religion does in Marx's analysis; it's an opiate of the
people. Coupled and settled down, the married masses are less likely to
protest in the streets or be insubordinate on the job. Kipnis is especially
sharp at pointing out how the rhetoric of the factory has permeated our
conversations about romance, citing in particular the contemporary cliche
about working on relationships. `No one works at adultery,' she notes, as she
goes on to catalog all the enforcement mechanisms required to keep legally
co-joined citizens from wandering out of what she calls `their domestic
gulags.' There's the booming business of therapy, and then in the private
sphere there's what Kipnis calls `the favorite recreational pastime of
coupledom,' mate behavior modification.

If you really want to spark a rip-roaring conversation with your spouse or
spousal equivalent, try setting aside a night to read through Kipnis'
nine-page list of all the things you can't do because you're in a couple.
Among them: You can't leave the house without saying where you're going; and
you can't be less concerned with the other person's vulnerability than with
expressing your own opinions. Kipnis' chilling verdict at the end of this
list is that `virtually no aspect of everyday life is not subject to
regulation and review, and in modern love acceding to a mate's commands is
what constitutes intimacy.'

Because Kipnis covers her back by reminding readers that the job of a polemic
is to poke holes in cultural piety, not to tell both sides of an issue, she
doesn't offer objections or solutions to the flat vision of nuptial numbness
she summons up. "Against Love" is such an unsettling and witty deconstruction
of marriage and monogamy, it will leave a lot of readers grasping for a
comeback, ideally something more engaging than the paranoid political rhetoric
of the Defense of Marriage Act.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at George University. She
reviewed "Against Love: A Polemic" by Laura Kipnis.

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GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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