THE END OF ROMANCE, by Lily Meyer
Romance is hot. The genre has busted out of the closet since the days my highbrow mother ineffectually hid her copy of “Lace,” the 1982 “bonkbuster” by Shirley Conran, under the unmentionables. It is now covered in a dedicated New York Times column and sold in bookstores with cupcake décor and names like Tropes & Trifles — this in Minneapolis, which at the moment could certainly use fewer rifles, more trifles.
Still, I was unprepared for quite how much window-steaming there would be in “The End of Romance,” a sly subversion and exemplar of the form that is Lily Meyer’s second novel. (Her first was about the intergenerational aftermath of the 1973 Chilean coup.)
Less anatomically unrelenting than Miranda July’s 2024 sensation “All Fours,” this peach-colored and peachy new book nonetheless takes for granted a kind of female sexual liberation and fluency that should have Masters and Johnson high-fiving in their empyrean laboratory. At least as expressed by its irrepressible protagonist, Sylvie Broder, a spiritual heiress to Judy Blume characters from “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself” to “Forever” and “Wifey.”
“Broder” is a shout-out to Herman’s surname in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Enemies: A Love Story.” In an afterword, Meyer, a translator, writes that she intended to model “The End of Romance” on this novel — published in Yiddish in 1966, English in 1972 — but changed tack. As in “Enemies,” however, both the Holocaust and a kind of polygamy propel the plot.
Sylvie’s paternal grandparents are survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp living joyfully in a “shrimp-colored condo” in Miami. An only child, she visits there on school breaks as relief from, and for, her restrictive parents in Marblehead, Mass., who have “the cool containment of British royals,” and scold her for sins like dawdling.
Her grandmother counsels Sylvie to listen to her body (and boy, will she ever); her grandfather, a liberal intellectual who introduces her to Martin Buber and Isaiah Berlin, advises that she acquire a few imaginary friends, including a talking turtle, to get her through familial difficulties. Listening to the Supreme Court debate Bush v. Gore gives him an actual heart attack.
Sylvie experiences her first kiss in a high school supply closet on Sept. 11, 2001, and progresses quickly to teaching her girlfriends how to perform fellatio using cucumbers. Suffering from anxiety, she finds relief in total sexual submission and is blessed with the kind of rare orgasmic ability that would have Freud joining in the high-fives. She matriculates at Amherst with her boyfriend, Jonah, and marries him young, despite early signs that the guy is a controlling jerk and worse.
The rest of “The End of Romance” concerns Sylvie’s escape from this misbegotten decision. She gets a master’s in philosophy and then goes to the University of Virginia for her Ph.D., taking pains to hide her whereabouts from Jonah long after Google has become common argot. Why this otherwise self-actualized young woman doesn’t simply divorce her abusive husband is a psychological mystery the novel leaves open-ended. When #MeToo arrives, she would rather explore the idea of personal autonomy than join a chorus of victims.
Like Renée Zellweger’s character in the delightful and recently rediscovered pastiche movie “Down With Love,” Sylvie is developing a theory of intimacy that will be put to the test by relationships in practice (or, as the philosophers say, praxis). As she works on her dissertation arguing for the end of romance — “she was going to be the Francis Fukuyama of romance, except that, unlike Francis Fukuyama, she was going to be right” — she’ll be torn between safe-harbor, high-earning, domestically adept Robbie and agreeable hiker Abie, an absolute sorcerer between the sheets.
While ostensibly questioning society’s strictures, Meyer is ringing a good old-fashioned love triangle — with Jonah’s regular, menacing emails a kind of timpani beat in the background. A few other fellows are put through their paces as well (“Wyatt had a blunt instrument”).
“The End of Romance” is about the pursuit of pleasure, and as such its pages are stuffed with details on food, fashion, furniture, friends and that other F-word. It’s endearingly sincere and tenderhearted toward its libidinous but psychologically vulnerable heroine (by the time Sylvie is 30, more cynical readers may well be ready to hurl her turtle into the imaginary Atlantic). It doesn’t mothball the bodice-ripper — that reductive term reclaimed by boutiques in Brooklyn and Los Angeles — but does rejigger its seams.
THE END OF ROMANCE | By Lily Meyer | Viking | 336 pp. | $29
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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