In Love

Fifty years ago Alfred Hayes was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists, and he deserves to be better known today. In Love is set in the Manhattan bar scene of the forties and reads like a Edward Hopper painting. A middle aged man tells a young woman on an adjacent bar stool the story of his last love affair: a relationship in the thoroughly modern sense, full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion. He depicts the boy of his tale as moody and evasive, the girl as even worse. It was a mostly erratic affair, downbeat, dysfunctional and on the brink of sinking without a trace — until an unscrupulous millionaire intervened. The ensuing turmoil will be recognisable to anyone who has fallen into — and then out of — a relationship. In Love is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart itself.