We’re all familiar with the word love, and all but the least fortunate of us will experience its passions at least once. But what is the word for that lingering, tangled solicitude that comes when love has left? It is precisely this sensation that the Bay Area writer Micheline Aharonian Marcom attempts to locate in her fifth book, “A Brief History of Yes.”
This is familiar territory for Marcom, as a fervid affair and its inevitable collapse were also the subject of her previous book, “The Mirror in the Well.” Both are short, lyric works centered on a damaged psyche’s battle with its dark compulsions, but whereas her previous novel was a screaming comet that tore through the ecstatic heights of a manic romance, “A Brief History of Yes” is the melancholy counterpart, an adagio circling around the absence created by a ruptured affair.
