Book Review: ‘The Book of Love,’ by Kelly Link

THE BOOK OF LOVE, by Kelly Link

A certain weight of expectation accrues on writers of short fiction who haven’t produced a novel, as if the short story were merely the larval stage of longer work. No matter how celebrated the author and her stories, how garlanded with prizes and grants, the sense persists: She will eventually graduate from the short form to the long. After an adolescence spent munching milkweed in increments of 10,000 words or less, she will come to her senses and build the chrysalis required for a novel to emerge, winged and tender, from within.

Now Kelly Link — an editor and publisher, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of five story collections, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — has produced a novel. Seven years in the making, “The Book of Love” — long, but never boring — enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.

Reviewing “The Book of Love” feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain.

Still, here goes: Set in 2014, in a small Massachusetts town called Lovesend, “The Book of Love” is the story of three local teenagers (and one stowaway) who return from the dead and must compete for the prize of remaining alive by completing a series of magical tasks.

It’s the story of the parents, siblings and lovers of those teenagers, the people who mourned them for the year they were gone and now, magically, have had those memories of grief replaced: The teens were never dead, they were only studying abroad.

It’s the story of the wizard-priests who guard either side of the door to the world of the dead; one of them is the teens’ high school music teacher, who must now instruct them in magic if they’re to survive.

It’s the story of a fey, cruel moon goddess who’s lost the key to her larder of souls, and the young man, now hundreds of years old, who bound himself to her service in exchange for a promise of revenge.

It’s the story of two sisters, one of whom is part of the undead trio, who can’t speak without hurting or irritating each other, but who also need each other, are lost without each other.

“The Book of Love” is made up of smaller books: Each character perspective is presented as “The Book of [character name],” with surprising detours into the interiority of objects or concepts. This might suggest discrete accounts with clear divisions between them, but the reality is more complex: These books are in conversation with one another, their lives interleaved.

Susanna and Laura Hand, the sisters, are in a band with Daniel Knowe, who’s been secretly dating Susanna but is opaquely detested by Mo Gorch, who is close friends with the girl Laura has a deep crush on — the girl Susanna kissed out of spite. They’ve all known one another since childhood, and they’re all on the cusp of adulthood. Tugging the story forward through these relationships are the questions of how Laura, Daniel and Mo died, why they came back, who or what slipped out of death alongside them, and what they all have to do to stay on this side of the grave.

It’s common to read a book with a strong sense of place and say that the setting is a character in the story. But in “The Book of Love,” it’s more correct to say that characters provide the story’s setting: Each “Book” is a dwelling place to experience a life, and taken together, the result is immense. As C.S. Lewis wrote of heaven and John Crowley wrote of fairyland, the further in you go, the bigger it gets — an experience that recalls the process of getting to know a person.

So much of Link’s work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise. In a 2023 profile for Vulture, Link observed: “The novel hardens as you go on. … At a certain point the ambitions, even the shape, begin to feel inevitable. The short story stays fluid.” I kept waiting for the novel to harden as it went on, but it never did; every sentence remained a springboard for new sound, piano keys rising and falling in new variations. In one chapter, a man summons his lover by playing wrong notes in an old song; Link’s project here sometimes feels like that, resisting an expected shape by leaning out of resolving cadences and into bumps, splinters, question marks.

“Don’t be ashamed of the things that you unabashedly love in narrative,” Link said in a 2019 speech. “Investigate them with a loving heart.” Investigating romance novels, small towns, families, the friends and music you make in high school, fairy villains and fairy lovers, with fascinated tenderness and deep familiarity, “The Book of Love” does justice to its name. Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all — that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love’s constituent parts, bound by and into it.

THE BOOK OF LOVE | By Kelly Link | Random House | 628 pp. | $31