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...1960s has long since passed and the belief that man can rule his own life is only an unrealized myth, David J. Samuels ’89 tells us in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” In the preface to this new book??which consists of a decade’s worth of his essays that have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker—Samuels informs readers that his story “has something to do with our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves...
...while Samuels does an astonishing job conveying the sense of malaise that affects our lives, his book, at times, feels like little more than a compilation of the author’s best clips. Though they show that Samuels can write almost everything about almost anything, the book??s somewhat haphazard construction obscures his message about how we can live the good life—or, at least, how it is that we’re failing...
...because Samuels rejects a structure that would flatten out the ridges in the absurdity of American reality, he often meanders and digresses; some essays don’t seem to fit in the book??s overarching theme at all. While reading the essay about Super Bowl XL in Detroit, I was not at all sure how describing Stevie Wonder as a “playful, gigantic black baby who has absorbed all terrestrial sounds and language in a single gulp” or Aretha Franklin as a “300-pound mountain of congealed hurt?...
...Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is not that Samuels fails to tap into the palpable uncertainty that regulates our lives, but that he overloads us with extraneous phrases and superfluous essays and so violates our need for order and regularity. Ultimately, with Samuels’ book??much as in life—we are left clinging on to particular moments that we find significant and pocket-sized absolutes...
Despite the complexity of the book??s material, “Warped Passages” sold well and became a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year...