Love Is a Four-Letter Word

We’d expect this sort of thing around February 14. But to put out a book full of relationship flameouts and broken hearts in the middle of summer-fling season seems particularly cold-hearted. And they wonder why publishing is dying.

But there’s life to be spotted in Love Is a Four-Letter Word. Of course, there are stories that are just about spectacular blowouts, like novelist George Singleton’s (Novel) yarn about dating a woman who looked like Cybill Shepherd and acted like the woman in Sybil. It ends with him getting drunk enough to break into her house and relieve himself in her cat’s litter box. And humorist Dan Kennedy’s “Exactly Like Liz Phair. Except Older. And with Hypochondria” is exactly as the title promises. Not surprisingly, the women provide the more nuanced memories. Jami Attenberg’s second-person “The Story You Will Tell” details the fluctuations of a doomed-from-the-start relationship with cool detail. And novelist Kate Christensen’s (Trouble) “Shadow Dancing” neatly limns the danger of an older man seducing high-school girls and the mixed emotions that elicits in the teens.

The book begins with novelist Junot Díaz’s (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) opening tale of a breakup in the Dominican Republic. Díaz and his girlfriend had planned a trip back to the island 20 years before, but the shine wore off just prior to shipping out, when he was caught cheating on her. The prodigal son had his problems: “If one of us wasn’t storming off down the road with a backpack, the other one was trying to hitch a ride to the airport with strangers.” In the end, neither the relationship nor Díaz’s assimilation into the island clicks. It’s to the book’s credit that the story is about much more than a breakup: It’s also about the ways we use relationships to try to define ourselves. And fail miserably.

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