The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Version of Love, by Millicent Dillon
reviewed by Nicholas Birns

Millicent Dillon. A Version of Love. Norton, 2003. 261 pp. $23.95.

Marx and Freud may be the two great toppled idols of our age, but what happened to Marx is clearer than what happened to Freud. Dillon’s risky and gripping tale takes us back to the 1950s, when Freudian psychoanalysis was king. The divorced Edmond begins an affair with his perplexed, vulnerable psychiatric patient Lorle (= “Lorelei”) while patronizing Vern Gosling, a rustic figure living in the remote Sierra foothills of California, a virile paragon who can teach Edmond the ropes of male bonding. Both men served in World War II, and the book is, tacitly, the story of what happened during “the explosion of the paradigm,” when the wheels of the postwar boom, and its certainties, began to come off. Dillon shreds our normative outlook. Revelations—some shocking—about sex, drugs, manipulation, violence, and death make Lorle realize that Edmond’s power games, in trying to extend his psychoanalytic authority to all of life, shake the confines of his personal integrity. A Version of Love is like Light in August or Far from the Madding Crowd as a woman leaving one man, ending up (tentatively) with another, frames a plot that nonetheless defers to atmosphere and ideas. Taut, lyrical, rife with a sense of the catalyzing tension of every act of being alive, Dillon’s sinewy, sensual (literally so, engaging all the senses) prose grapples equally with the “risk in repetition, in a foreshortened history of desire,” the landscapes of the Sierras, Big Sur, and Mexico, and the feel of eating moldy cheese in a rundown urban apartment. Dillon records an era of transition, with one eye always on our own present moment, also one of transition, perhaps to the “rough beast” that Yeats feared, perhaps not.