INTERPRETATIONS OF LOVE

A novel about love and loss in the long century after World War II.

In 1946, a woman writes a letter to a man with whom she had a romantic encounter after he saved her from a bomb blast during the Blitz in Liverpool five years earlier. She believes that her daughter might be his, though she has married another man and lives a happy life. She asks her brother to send it, but he doesn’t, because days later she and her husband are killed in a car accident, leaving their daughter an orphan. Fast-forward 50 years or so, and that daughter, Agnes, is grown up, her own daughter is getting married, and her uncle decides he should give Agnes the letter at his grandniece’s wedding. He’s read the missive, and he knows that, through a series of uncanny coincidences, Agnes has already met the man who might be her father. Indeed, he has become part of her extended family. This is not a spoiler. These connections are revealed in the first section of the novel, which alternates between the long, leisurely first-person narratives of Agnes’ uncle, Agnes herself, and the man who might be her father. The novel’s true subject is not will or reason, the engine of many plots, but rather the opposite: the murky unconscious. The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza comes up repeatedly, with all three characters quoting some version of his critique of free will: “If a stone that had been thrown had consciousness it would believe that it had chosen its own trajectory.” Each character slowly comes to feel the force of loss, the way the past “tends to leak into the present all the time,” and the deep mystery of love and connection. Campbell probes these complicated ideas in clear, shimmering prose, turning the characters’ engagement with their psyches into something quite intoxicating.

A heady and heart-filled debut novel by an author whose first story collection was published when she was 80.