This book describes a lifelong relationship between Rabih and Kirsten - an architect and a municipal planner, respectively - who met on the job while building a traffic circle for a little town in Scotland. It’s a charming love story, made intentionally trite in order to afford a steady process of generalization that runs throughout the narrative, helpfully set apart from the plot in blocked-out italics.

Despite the artistic pretensions I found the story fairly interesting, which is a little curious given how thoroughly cliched the whole story is. There’s the meet-cute, the simple wedding, the struggle over money, even the requisite affair. Through it all I found myself rooting for this thoroughly boring couple, which I suppose is a testament to the storytelling. Perhaps because the story is told from Rabih’s point of view, perhaps because of my own built-in biases, or who knows what, I sympathized with Kirsten more than I did with Rabih; but more than that I wanted the two of them to succeed.

Kirsten’s character is considerably less detailed than his, drawn as it is in parenthetical expressions that are almost afterthoughts. That is one of the great flaws of this novel, that it purports to analyze and dissect a modern love affair without more than a cursory attempt to look through the eyes of half of the couple. Another is that the work is just so hideously pretentious and smug; that is especially annoying considering that the point of view is so fixed and Freudian. That gets old fast. And a final flaw is just how readily the story attempts to generalize a picture of love from perhaps the most storied and already-studied context available, that of the white-collar, middle-class couple living in a modern industrialized nation. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that as such.. but where’s the challenge in analyzing this already over-analyzed unit? There’s nothing all that interesting about rehashing an idea that is so old, that it is basically the foundation for all of English fictional literature.

For all that: this book is not without its insights, and more than a few times I found myself thinking that the writing is eerily incisive. I’m the exact audience the book is intended for, so I guess, no surprise really. There are certainly some interesting ideas contained here, though they are rather more self-important than I like.