Essays in Love
A philosophical novel about falling in love and its aftermath, structured as a series of analytical essays embedded in a first-person romantic narrative.
Summary
The narrator meets Chloe on a plane from Paris and falls in love over the course of the novel, which charts the relationship from attraction through infatuation, the first declarations, the anxieties of intimacy, and eventually Chloe's departure and the narrator's subsequent depression.
What makes it unusual is the structure: de Botton stops the narrative every few pages to name and analyze the psychological mechanism being depicted. A chapter on idealization will include a section called "Idealization" that explains the cognitive error. A chapter on jealousy will dissect jealousy with references to Stendhal and Proust. The effect is either clinical distancing that ruins the romance or a kind of generous illumination that makes the familiar strange again.
De Botton is working in the tradition of French philosophical fiction, but the register is lighter. He's funny, and he doesn't take the analysis more seriously than the story. The book's argument is that love is not diminished by being understood, and that the reason love causes such pain is that it makes audacious demands on the self that the self usually fails to meet.
The section on Marxism and romantic relationships, in which the narrator uses Marxist categories to analyze the power dynamics of who loves more, is the set piece that sticks.
Quotes
"Perhaps it is true that we do not know what we have until we lose it, but we also do not know what we have been missing until it arrives."
"Romantic love is a story we tell ourselves about another person, and we love the story as much as the person."