A Natural History of Love
By Diane Ackerman
Random House, 358 pages, $23
In a recent essay on hummingbirds in the New York Times Magazine, poet-essayist Diane Ackerman’s virtues as a writer shone forth. This pithy piece, witty and lyrical with just a hint of ecstasy and swagger spicing its prose, blended information and anecdote and served them up like a fine souffle.
The essay was a welcome assurance that Ackerman-whose 1990 book, “A Natural History of the Senses,” became a surprise best seller-is as sharp a writer as ever.
How to explain, then, her new book, “A Natural History of Love,” which is such a shambles that it is difficult to believe it came from Ackerman’s pen? Its rhetorical overkill, sheer sloppiness, absurd generalizations and long digressions raise painful questions about the relationship between a writer’s sensibility and her subject matter.
In “A Natural History of the Senses,” Ackerman had a firm framework for her observations and insights: the human body. Exploring the workings of smell, touch, taste, hearing, vision and synesthesia, she grounded her occasionally hyperbolic flights in hard fact. Her quirky sensibility brought such phenomena as sneezing, kissing and cannibalism vividly to life, and she seemed to have an endless knowledge of literature, etymology, anthropology and history to draw on.
In “A Natural History of Love,” Ackerman the scholar is much in evidence, but Ackerman the writer seems to have been defeated by the broad, vague nature of her subject. The book rambles from pop psychology to pop history to pop-music references, but it seldom creates the shivers of recognition and delight that distinguished its predecessor.
The problems start with Ackerman’s fantasy that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, when spoken aloud, would force you “to purse your lips into a waiting kiss just to utter them.” (How many sounds can you make with your lips puckered?)
Ackerman organizes the book into chapters on the history of love, ideas about love, the metabolism and evolution of passion and the customs and varieties of love one finds around the world. Along the way, she offers some surprising tidbits of information, telling us that sexual abduction was legal in England until the 13th Century and disclosing the origins of the exchange of wedding rings, the baking of wedding cakes and other nuptial practices.
But can we believe her? Elsewhere she is remarkably slipshod, identifying the brain as a muscle group and saying that French writer Stendhal, thwarted in romance, resembles Frankenstein when she obviously means Frankenstein’s monster. She also manages to see Arthurian conventions of courtly love as “an almost Marxist revolt against the Church” and offers a bizarre plot summary of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”: “The streets are full of fluids that belong inside bodies. The streets swarm with the unknowingly embalmed.”
Her prose offers goofy mixed metaphors (“At night, Amsterdam opens its veins and pours forth the neon milk of cities”) and blanket statements that have the cumulative effect of a harangue: “We are obsessed with lights.” “We crave pattern.” “We are touchoholics, we are attachment junkies, we are affectopaths.”
Why, if Ackerman could be so winningly eloquent on sweat, pain and color perception in her earlier book, has she not brought the same command of prose and perception to lust and passion? No answer could make up for the letdown one feels in reading this book.
