Name: In Love
Rating: 4.5 (5 reviews)

Alfred Hayes

A middle-aged businessman reminisces about the young divorcee with whom he was in love, but lost to a wealthy stranger.

In Love

A middle-aged businessman reminisces about the young divorcâee with whom he was in love, but lost to a wealthy stranger.

donna 

Gary Homewood

A man nearing forty talking to a twenty something women in a Manhattan bar about his doomed affair. Noir-ish, psychologically acute to the cruelties and yearnings to understand his mind and that of his lover. With the unmistakable atmosphere of a Hopper painting.

Trevor Berrett

** spoiler alert **
           The salacious premise of In Love is relatively basic and easy to understand. A man is sitting at a bar across from a beautiful woman, who is getting more and more beautiful as the night drags on. What’s the topic of conversation? The man’s dead relationship with a young woman who, one innocent night, met a rich man who offered her $1,000 to go to bed with him. She does not accept, but it still spells doom for the couple. They spend most of the book unsuccessfully broken up.

Possibly drunk when he tells this story, it’s obvious the relationship — or the absence of the relationship — is still affecting him deeply. It may be a strange topic of conversation when one is sitting across from another woman, but the man is, quite frankly, sick of it all. After all, when you strip it away, when you stop imitating someone you’re apparently supposed to be, what on earth are you? He tells the girl she can look at him closely, “all of me real enough if one doesn’t look too closely.”

I was completely engaged as this story took off. It’s remarkably astute, Hayes’s portrait of a man’s existential dread when he’s witnessed the dissolution of a relationship he felt was solid — well, at least a relationship he couldn’t imagine ending. If that relationship wasn’t real, if it’s just a prop on a stage, then what is real? What is the purpose? What is our destination?

I've written more here.

Hayes's masterpiece is an exquisite depiction of a doomed love affair set in noirish, 1950s New York. In a Manhattan bar, a middle-aged man tells a pretty girl a story: of how he fell into a relationship with a lonely young divorcee; of how one night she was offered a thousand dollars to sleep with a stranger; and of how he and she would subsequently betray each other in turn. In Alfred Hayes's exquisite novella, love - in all its bewildering turns of longing, elation, heartbreak and regret - is dissected with unforgettable honesty and heartbreaking clarity.

In Love

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