‘Nothing But You’ All About Love, Romance And Human Relationships

“Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker” edited by Roger Angell (Random House, 471 pages, $25.95)

Love is more than a many-splendored thing in “Nothing But You,” the New Yorker’s anthology culled from the last three decades of its fiction.

The 38 short stories offer variations on romance - love consummated, love thwarted, love found, love lost, love in every possible combination of human relationships, with inevitable tinges of irony, bitterness and despair.

Such a feast of good writing stuns the senses. Among the distinguished authors: V.S. Pritchett, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bobbie Ann Mason and Donald Barthelme.

“Love becomes life,” says Roger Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor since 1956, a frequent contributor since 1953 and assembler of this notable collection.

“Reading the stories in this book will make many of us wish to fall in love again,” Angell writes in his introduction, “but just as often, I think, it will be quite the other way: My God, spare me, just this once. Save me from this unexpected woman, this unlikely man - from this sudden happiness and then the crushing loss.

“Don’t let me wait for her phone call or for another of her ill-spelled, beautiful letters. Enough of plans and heartfelt talks and wearying complications, enough with tears. But then, as we go on reading, we may change our minds. I don’t care - I want it all, no matter what. Bring it back, let me be in love again.”

Angell praises the energy of the lovers in the stories.

“Love drives us onward - or keeps us at home, noticing and longing, or grasping after what was here all along. What a mess! What a situation! What a subject for a writer!”

What a subject, indeed.

Mary Robison, in her exquisite story, “Yours,” uses little more than two pages to capture a poignant moment in a May-December marriage - she, 35, he, 78 - as they carve pumpkins for Halloween. His are expressive and artful, hers deftly traditional. They light the candles, look at the “orange faces.”

But the innocence of that scene is broken by this haunting sentence: “In her bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been predicted, she began to die. ‘Don’t look at me if my wig comes off,’ she tells her husband. ‘Please.”’

David Plante writes of a man whose wife died just weeks before. He goes to the theater to see the actress with whom he’d had an affair when they were young. He meets her backstage. They confess that at the time, each of their spouses knew of their illicit love. And now? The ending is bittersweet.

Mary Grimm traces the wife-and-mother lives of a few women friends through the best of times, when they “sat in one of our kitchens with the kids milling around while we talked on, oblivious, or cooked together, or sat under the apple trees; how we were pulled together like magnets every morning after our husbands went to work.” And more.

Then came the era of going to college, getting jobs, and a question is wrenched from their hearts: “Do we miss it, what we had together when there was no one else in the world but mothers and children? And do we miss it, the soft solid feel of our children’s bodies under our hands … their questions asking why and what and how the world is made and ordered and laid out before us? No. Not every day.”

Ann Beattie’s “The Cinderella Waltz” portrays modern love carried to new heights. The narrator, the former wife of a man who now lives with his male lover, generously shares their young daughter with the pair. She loves all three at the expense of any identity or love of her own.

When the father/former husband plans a move to California, she worries the break will be too severe for the child, but his promise of a first-class ticket and a ride in a glass elevator to the top of the Fairmont Hotel solves the problem.

She wonders if she and the lovers have been playing house with the child - “pretending to be adults.” She remembers that before her child was born, her husband “used to put his ear to my stomach and say that if the baby turned out to be a girl he would put her into glass slippers instead of bootees. Now he is the prince once again. I see them in a glass elevator, not long from now, going up and up, with the people below getting smaller and smaller, until they disappear.”

It is such shattering writing that makes the reading go slow, the better to savor each morsel; each glimpse into the dimensions of the word that refuses to be defined in any one way by any one generation.

That many-splendored, awful, tragic, glorious word, love.