Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend, Ben, a restrained Princeton professor, when she runs into Michael, a long-lost friend. A complex and compelling composer, Michael was once a catalyzing muse for her-but his return to her life is a destabilizing influence. Julia is drawn to Michael, but feels enormous guilt at the thought of betraying Ben-not to mention fear at the … idea of giving up the security of her relationship with him. So, when Michael signals that he’s too wounded to make a commitment, she turns her triangular situation into a square: she sets him up with her cousin. Why is it easier for a woman to be a muse than to have one? Are security and imagination mutually exclusive? Can one be fully creative-in art or life-without the inspiration of erotic love? These are the questions asked in The Geometry of Love, a provocative and deeply psychological tale that explores the surprising choices we make in our romantic lives.
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“The Geometry of Love” by Jessica Levine is a very fine, well-written and eminently readable book, and it is also rather deep (in a totally engaging good way, mind you). While on one level it is a romance—or more correctly a love story–, it also operates as a kind of historical novel of the seventies and eighties.
The protagonist is a “fifties baby” and the story follows her life, her growth, and her struggles from college in the 70s until more recent times. Julia, the star and narrator of the novel, is highly educated, intelligent, and introspective as she journeys through her youth and into her middle-age. As a double major in English and Math, she is creative, but practical, and these often-conflicting drives pull her back and forth. As she enters her early 30s, she reflects “the sorrowful feeling that I hadn’t used my twenties well.”
If great conflicts make great stories, this one is fulfilled. Cultural conflicts abound, conflicts between family, between lovers, between friends, and between one’s inner voices as well as the tensions between the creative and the practical sides of the characters enrich the drama in the story. The ticking biological clock and the have-a-baby-don’t-have-a-baby is another conflict.
The story is very honest—and authentic. (I am the same generation as Julia and recognized how accurate the descriptions of things, culture, and conflicts, as well as the emerging women’s issues about work and health and family obligations are in the book.)
The love story moves through the book in waves. Julia loves Ben. But she also loves Michael. Ben is stable and neat and successful. He and Julia have been together for a long time. Michael is an artistic bohemian sort, messy and erratic in his ability at earning a living. Ben and Michael were roommates in graduate school, but the friendship ended with disappointment and jealousy. Michael and Julia only had the one big kiss in the seventies , but each remembers it for years when they accidentally meet in a bookstore in NYC in 1987.
Julie used to write poetry. Michael used to be a composer. Both talk together and think often about being or finding their muse. Meanwhile Ben works too hard on getting tenure at Princeton. And Julia takes over her father’s business. But the theme of finding or being a muse floats through the story gently, enhancing the book.
The characters moved me with their decisions—some good, some radically not wise—and the author does an excellent job of getting into their heads and hearts. The scope of the story line—some thirty years—is ambitious but the author pulls it off wonderfully well.
The writing is exceptionally well done, with thoughtful and eloquent phrasing throughout. For example, Jessica Levine speaks of “the cruel abracadabra of divorce, whereby parts of your history disappear and are replaced by the submerged parts of the self that you get back.”
The book shows great insight also as in “Thus it often happens that the traits that make someone initially attractive turn into the Achilles’ hell of the relationship.”
All in all, a very fine, thoughtful book, well worth the read. I did receive a free copy of the book, but am reviewing it honestly on my own.