[In the following review, Prose finds parallels between de Botton's On Love and Stendhal's On Love, and judges de Botton's work as sharp, funny, and well written.]

In the preface to his treatise On Love, Stendhal breezily takes off running past those indolent earlier writers who dropped out of the game after cataloging only “400 or 500 of the successive emotions, so difficult to recognize, which go to make up this passion.” Stendhal way overshot the 500 mark in his own effort to categorize and to analyze, to qualify and to refine, to collect every anecdote and trenchant word ever uttered about l'amour.

Now, in a smart and ironic first novel, also entitled On Love, Alain de Botton picks up the torch, so to speak, more or less where Stendhal left off. De Botton's On Love reads as if Stendhal had lived into the '90s, survived modern critical theory (as he clearly has), thought it was funny (as he likely would have), but retained a novelist's sympathy for the impulse—which he shared—to deconstruct and to dissect in search of some higher understanding.

Divided into titled chapters (“Romantic Fatalism,” “The Subtext of Seduction,” “False Notes,” “Romantic Terrorism” and so on) and brief, numbered sections separated by space breaks, de Botton's novel is a mock and serious philosophical inquiry into the grand passion that Stendhal compared to the Milky Way, “a bright mass made up of thousands of little stars, each of which is often itself a nebula.” What launches the novel's obsessive, self-conscious and rather sweetly cerebral narrator on his own astral explorations is an intense and ill-starred love affair with a woman named Chloe.

He and Chloe meet on a shuttle from Paris to London and have a flirty conversation over the airplane safety diagram card. They dine in restaurants with names like Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Lao Tzu, seduce each other, make love, fall in love, partly combine their busy London lives (he is an architect, she a graphic designer) into a sort of third life with a history of its own and recurrent leitmotifs based on shared experience (a corpse they discover in the street, a stranger who passes Chloe a mash note in a bagel shop). They go on lovers' holidays that are at first ecstatic, then markedly less idyllic as their passion falters, until their romance crashes and burns on a flight from Paris, slyly written as the evil twin of the flight on which they met.

One of the novel's nervy jokes is how perfectly ordinary, how unexceptional, all this is. (The course of this affair would doggedly follow the parabola we can imagine the narrator drawing along with the visual aids—diagrams and charts—that he scatters throughout the text.) De Botton is well aware of this. And the narrator knows it, too. But that doesn't keep him from making his textbook-case romance the center of his life, and the improbable springboard for his metaphysical triple flips. So each mini-step forward or setback in his love moves him to microscopic analysis or flights of heroic abstraction.

At moments he succumbs with almost giddy abandon to passages of loony post-structuralist rhetoric, sheer bombast and quasi-academic absurdity. Fearing that Chloe has begun to fake orgasm, he plots a logarithmic measure of the sincerity of her response:

It was at first hard for me to imagine an untruth lasting 3.2 seconds fitted into a sequence of eight 0.8-second contractions, the first and last two (3.2s) of which were genuine. It was easier to imagine a complete truth, or a complete lie, but the idea of a truth-lie-truth pattern seemed perverse and unnecessary.

Alternately, he is capable of keen observation, flashes of genuine lyricism, acuity and depth:

However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily prevents us … from starting other romantic liaisons. But why should this constrain us if we truly loved them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? The answer perhaps lies in the uncomfortable thought that in resolving our need to love, we may not always succeed in resolving our need to long.

The great minds of the past—Saint Theresa of Avila, Darwin, Freud, the Oracle at Delphi—are quoted and consulted, as if for second opinions on the state of his love for Chloe.

What lends On Love its sprightliness is the satisfying way in which these philosophical test-balloons are repeatedly sent up and almost immediately punctured by little pellets of reality: here, the phenomenally banal events that mark this love affair's milestones. Deflated, theory collapses into fiction, into elegantly taut and deftly paced comic scenes. So, intent on seduction, the narrator resolves to obliterate his personality and remake himself in the image of someone Chloe might love. “My idea of what she wanted from a lover could have been compared to a tight-fitting suit and my true self to a fat man, so that the evening was a process resembling a fat man's trying to fit into a suit that is too small for him.”

The problem is, he doesn't know enough about Chloe to know what she might want, until at last Chloe reveals a fondness for chocolate cake and he orders the sweet dessert—to which he is allergic. A meditation on the reality of Chloe's apparent perfection ends abruptly when she refers to a Bach cantata as “impossible yodeling.” A dream of perfect union with one's Platonic “other half” ends when Chloe brings home a new pair of truly hideous shoes, “a platformed sole rising sharply up to a heel with the breadth of a flat shoe but as tall as a stiletto,” and a “faintly rococo collar, decorated with a bow and stars and framed by a piece of chunky ribbon.” In the midst of a convoluted meditation on the differences between political terrorism—Japanese Red Army members mowing down airplane passengers—and romantic terrorism—“a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempts to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one”—these lovers have a hilarious, grimly quotidian squabble in which each accuses the other of having locked their hotel key in the room.

It is a tricky novel, but to de Botton's credit the tricks are never cloying, and they are almost always amusing, not least because we sense the writer's own exhilaration in being able to make them work. This, of course, is quite different from watching a writer show off. Unusual things do work in this book; somehow de Botton is able to draw Chloe's character sharply even through the myopic lens of her self-obsessed lover, to make us sympathize with him and with her, and at the same time understand why she can't stand him, forever. (What woman would want to stay with a man who could so drastically doubt his love simply because he thinks that she has bought an awful pair of new shoes?)

It is a tricky thing to construct a novel on the framework of a plot that is, by design, ordinary and predictable. But it is precisely because we know it all so well—that first blush of attraction, that last quarrel about the keys—that the novel is so credible and so funny. And de Botton plays a daring game with how seriously we are meant to take this: we are mostly willing to agree that this romance is a matter of life and death, even though the narrator never loses his ironic distance or his self-conscious rationality, not even in the midst of sex or a half-serious suicide attempt. We come to feel, as he does, that his love is a matter of consequence, even though we are told from the start, “Until one is actually dead (and then it must be considered impossible) it is difficult to consider anyone as the love of one's life.”

The book's success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader's intelligence. A wonderful chapter, titled “Marxism,” takes its text from “the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him” and, blithely assuming we will understand that this Marx is Groucho, not Karl, goes on to discuss this Marxism, a theory that addresses the problem of continuing to love someone even though that person loves us. Only very rarely does de Botton's nerve slip, as it does near the end, when he anxiously makes certain that we know precisely how far all this hard mental labor has finally gotten his narrator:

Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the reason that no matter how hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series) analysis could never be anything but flawed—and therefore never stray far from the ironic.

One can't blame de Botton for stating the obvious, and not just because he's a first novelist. Some might suggest that this is not the ideal moment in literary history in which to stake everything on the reading public's intelligence, on its awareness of subtlety, even on its ability to read. One hopes that On Love will find its readers, the ones who get the joke, who understand that fiction can be funny and serious, who don't mistrust irony as an elitist trick; who can, without prompting, distinguish Groucho from Karl.