The Invention of Love
The Invention of Love by Sara Schaff, Split/Lipp Press, $16.00
I’m thinking about death. I am thinking about love. I am thinking about death and love, intertwining. This is what happens to your brain when you read Sara Schaff’s newest book, The Invention of Love. Opposites attract and mix and slyly become one another in the perspective of the wry and self-effacing narrator of the title story. A greasy sketch on limestone blooms into an elegant, nuanced lithograph depicting relationships, which then morphs into something embarrassing when the narrator moves to pin it up amongst the class work in her lithography class.
The death part comes in when the beautiful and truly gifted lithography student falls from a building and does not die. He died/ he didn’t die. The story plays with us. Love, death, not death. An exotic tea-drinking girl with a “a cheerful nose ring” holds the narrator’s hand in a gesture of shared grief as the class packs in a van to visit the hospital where the not dead lithography student is recovering.
The ultimate smashing of love and near death takes place when Elliot, the injured lithography student waves her over and tells her he has always loved her. Only he gets her name wrong. Was it love? Or was it the fall?
Turns out another student, who also fell from the building, has died. Back in the dorms, with her friends, the narrator takes ownership of this disaster: “We observed a moment of silence for this stranger, and when I felt it had been long enough, I said, “I know the person who survived.”
As with the cute nose ring girl in the van, who comforted her with handholding after she revealed she had practically been at the scene, the friend in her apartment, digests her story about the lithography student, nearly choking on his bagel. She doesn’t tell her friend about the mistaken name calling (“Angie”- who she isn’t)…and doesn’t reveal her warm feelings about Elliot because she doesn’t want to seem like “a love opportunist”.
Almost everyone in this story, (and in this book, it turns out), is a sort of love opportunist: the nose ring girl, the teacher who gets teary with emotion over the injured Elliot, Elliot himself, and one of her friends whom she beds on a whim, after realizing he has a crush on another friend.
Love is invented in different ways in many of the fourteen stories in this book, which carries an epigraph from Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” A fine description indeed of the author’s work here. Making and unmaking love in various contexts with narrow and often nil success.
In “Affective Memory”, the narrator vividly and joyfully dreams about a college boyfriend, but is distressed when she realizes, upon awakening, that she cannot recall his last name; graduate writing students have sex and read one another’s manuscripts with admiration and cruelty in “Something Else”; a woman bereft after her mother’s death and preparing the family home for sale, flirts with an overly polished real estate agent in “House Hunting”. And, in what is perhaps the most painful story in the collection, a very pregnant American woman in China flees to a nice hotel where she indulges in comfy sheets and room service after her husband confesses he has fallen in love with a Belgian woman.
In the end, the truest expression of genuine love that takes the stage in this collection of stories, is not among the adults, who seem mostly love broken, but in the story “We are Ready” in which a little girl finds an injured rabbit in the woods:
“Nora bent down, pushed aside the leaves, and lifted the rabbit
gently into her arms. He reared his head back, thumping his foot
against her chest. Her mother would know what to do. She pressed
him to the dress and kissed his head. His heart beat wildly next to
hers.”
In her first book of short stories, Say Something Nice About Me, Schaff also often turned her attention toward failed relationships and misplaced affection. In that book, she also experimented with form, and even wrote one story in the form of a dissertation outline, including footnotes. The Invention of Love feels like an extension of her interest in this topic, but here she delves deeper into the heart, and finds more nuanced emotional gems and deeper darkness.
The Invention of Love is a not so much a book about love, in the end, but rather, it seems, about how much we want it, while mired in our quotidian lives. Romance is upstaged by the ordinary here. People notice aging heads of lettuce in supermarkets and wonder about things like if Romancing the Stone was Danny DeVito’s best movie, and how Teen Mom really doesn’t prepare one for the realities of childbirth. Regular stuff. The loveliest thing about Schaff’s second book is the way she captures all this, in spare, hauntingly eloquent prose that reveals the emptiness of so many people’s lives. How utterly loveless they are.
Elizabeth Cohen
Elizabeth teaches creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and through Gotham Writer’s Workshops in New York. She is the author of The Hypothetical Girl, a collection of short stories, The Family on Beartown Road and four books of poetry, including What the Trees Said. She lives in upstate New York with her daughter, Aviva, and way too many cats. Learn more at www.elizabethcohen.net.