[In the following review, Hobbs evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Love, Again.]

Doris Lessing, the noted British fiction writer best known for The Golden Notebook, has turned her attention to the unfamiliar subject of passion among the late middle-aged [in Love, Again]. Sarah, the central character of Lessing's first novel in seven years, is a 65-year-old widow with grown-up children. Her daily life revolves around her successful career as writer and administrator for an alternative London theater company called the Green Bird, which decides to produce a play based on the imaginary life of Julie Vairon, a recently rediscovered early feminist writer and composer who committed suicide in 1912. Not that she could be easily pigeonholed by contemporary feminists, since “for some she is the archetypal female victim, while others identify with her independence.”

If Vairon's life attracts different people for various reasons, the actors this complicated project brings together form an intense theatrical family; couples fall in and out of love as in the fairy-tale world of Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In this post-modern world, however, they do not end up as young married couples. Instead, they ultimately remain alone, falling back on their careers and sustaining friendships, Sarah's included.

Sarah finds the younger generation compellingly attractive but difficult to understand. She falls in love with a handsome and seductive 28-year-old actor, who soon rejects her. A competent but pushy young woman gradually takes over her theater company. And for years she has done her best to mother a niece, now a rebellious young dropout and drug addict.

Julie Vairon also baffles and attracts Sarah with her romantically unconventional life, rejecting offers of marriage and living on her own in a forest cottage. In her attempt to recreate her character, Lessing quotes extensively from Julie's journals and reports the raptures her music produces on all who hear it.

This biographical focus allows Lessing to explore the conflicts between life and art, including by implication her own novel. Their play about Julie Vairon necessarily omitted a good deal of material, because “there was 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.”

Lessing's novel itself could have used more of this tidying, since the author does not really succeed in making Julie into a presence with more than historical interest. As readers, we are left wondering what their shared obsession is really about. The novel's center does not captivate our attention as it does the actors' and directors'. Hence the reader is doubly skeptical when it comes to Stephen, Sarah's male counterpart and close friend, a wealthy middle-aged country gentleman so completely in love with his fantasy image of the long-dead Julie that he sees no alternative to suicide.

Lessing is more convincing with her closely observed portrait of Sarah as she experiences the unfamiliar elations and depressions of the frustrated love affairs that occur in her imagination rather than in her bed. Sarah, “who had not for years thought of marrying, or even of living with a man, had believed herself to be happily solitary, now watched long submerged fantasies surface.” The author analyzes the surprising pain and anguish as Sarah revisits the passions that governed her youth, when beauty and romance were hers as if by right.

By means of her central character Lessing philosophizes wisely on love, noting, for example, how “there is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin. The woman (the girl, rather) who dreamed of past loves thought adult Sarah a fool for being content with so little.” Yet Sarah ends as she began—reasonably content and living alone—a stance that also defines Lessing's tone throughout this novel.

Lessing's prose is characterized by an old-fashioned formal clarity and intelligence that feels more essayistic than novelistic; she tells her readers as much as she shows us. So we are generally kept at a comfortable distance, even from Sarah and her rediscovered passions, more inclined to analyze them than to experience along with her that “mix of anguish, incredulity, and—at the height of the illness—a sick sweet submersion in pain because it is inconceivable that anything so terribly desired cannot be given, and if you relinquish the pain, then the hope of bliss is abandoned too.”

This narrative distance allows Sarah (and Lessing) a philosophical overview that controls and interprets emotions almost before they occur. If this makes for an intelligent meta-novel of love, it also gives the book an air of unreality that is further intensified by the theatrical world and its historical recreation of Vairon's 19th-century life.

If Doris Lessing had given Sarah's rambling reminiscences the condensed and balanced form that her comedic vision of the world implies, her readers might have had a minor classic of love to place on the same shelf with Goethe's, Stendahl's and Colette's. What we have instead is an interesting and readable psychological novel that rises well above the average level of its romantic genre.