[In the following review, Newson describes the plot and narrative elements of Love, Again.]

Doris Lessing's most recent novel, Love, Again, explores familial relationships, romantic love, loss, life in the theater, and human folly against the backdrop of the aging process. It is also a study of love and loving intertwined with reflections on the writer—her craft and detractors. Lessing's narrative is interspersed with dreams, correspondence, waking anguish, and interpretation of “ordinary” existence. In this work Lessing forges below surfaces, traveling to often uncomfortable venues. Still, the tapestry she weaves is intensely satisfying.

Sarah Durham is a sixty-five-year-old widow who has not been in love for twenty years. One of the managers of a small theater in London. Sarah at last becomes affected by the theatrical scene. Music, actors, and the make-believe operate to transform the sensible widow into a creature of emotions. Like a younger heroine, she takes her readers and her suitors on a merry chase. And as in the play that throws her into the society of the men she would covet, she experiences “too much of everything: too many ragged ends, false starts, possibilities rejected—too much life, in short, so it all had to be tidied up.”

The play, largely adapted from the journals of Julie Vairon, a nineteenth-century quadroon who lived in Martinique and then in France, is the focal point of development in the novel. Sarah, who undertakes to adapt the journals to the stage, is moved by the heroine's life, visual artistry, and music. Vairon's journals reveal her life to be a series of dispassionate observations on three loves, all of whom are wealthy, white, and unattainable. Sarah has read the journals and has recast them for the stage, accompanied by Vairon's own music. It is during the process of attaining backing for the play that Sarah meets Stephen Ellington-Smith, a wealthy Maecenas who is himself “in love” with Julie Vairon. During the course of production, the director and leading men fall in love with Sarah. Stephen is assigned the safe position of “brother,” and Sarah struggles with her newfound, unwanted emotional state. Of her precarious state, she muses, “Old women by the thousand—probably by the million—are in love and keep quiet about it. They have to.”

Interspersed with Sarah's intrigues are dramatic questions. Was Julie Vairon murdered? Who is in love with whom in this array of theatrical characters? Will Sarah ever be free of the yoke of her brother's emotionally disturbed laughter? Is there a cure for Stephen? As one of Sarah's younger, self-confessed lovers explains, the situation is to be blamed on the theater: “It's all the fault of the theater, of show business, so don't take any notice.” If theater is the culprit, however, what is the remedy? Ultimately, Sarah muses:

To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the sufferer does not want to be cured, even while crying, “I can't endure this non-life, I can't endure this desert.”

Another thought, perhaps of a more practical kind: When Cupid aims his arrows (not flowers or kisses) at the elderly and old, and brings them to grief, is this one way of hustling people who are in danger of living too long off the stage, to make way for the new?

Readers will immediately compare Lessing's efforts in Love, Again with those of The Summer before the Dark, her 1973 novel of Kate Brown's awakening at age forty-five into an awareness of her position in the world. Kate, afflicted by a mysterious malaise, has an affair with a sickly younger man and eventually accepts her own aging. Love, Again, however, is richer, more fulfilling with its false starts and turns, much like life itself. Sarah is a vital character alternately young and old, maternal and predatory, reserved and daring. The novel's commentaries on human folly, observations on love and art, use of a tale within a tale to spur action, and melodic language make it a work well worth experiencing.