Making Love: A Romance

Rating:
Summary: Love Vanishes Again and Again in One Woman's Life.
Review: You might expect a series of erotic love tales from the title of Lucretia Stewart's novel, "Making Love," but what one gets instead is a seemingly endless parade of failed love affairs that have a propensity for the desperate, not steamy, sultry side. The author's sentences are crisp and to the point as we watch the unnamed female protagonist meander from the beginning of her love life in the 1970s to the present. Her choice of dysfunctional men reaches its zenith with Louis, a married manic-depressive alcoholic.
Stewart's characters appear to be tragically compulsive and unable to act in their own best interests, even when the choices are clear. For example, the unnamed female protagonist is unable to leave Louis because she feels like it is "one big movie" and says "I couldn't let go because the relationship had developed a life, a momentum of its own, which was quite separate from the individuals involved in it." Stewart's writing transmits a palpable sense of loss, depicting characters that cling to an unhappy fate out of fear and habit.