Emmalea Russo on Sarah Gerard's Engulfing True Love

Poet Emmalea Russo reviews Sarah Gerard's newest book, True Love (Harper, 2020), "at once love story and annihilation tale," for LARB. "[F]or Nina, the troubled protagonist ... engulfment is the mechanism by which she annihilates herself — mostly in despair and occasionally in fulfillment," writes Russo. More:

We watch as Nina gets engulfed by her own red tide as it spreads and as it spreads, it overtakes others — the reader, too. The luster of True Love lies in its ability to hold a tenor, a mood so much so that it becomes a character, living and breathing. Nina herself is not a particularly likable character: she lies, cheats, puts others through grotesque amounts of pain. As the reader, I feel chosen, as I’m invited into Nina’s most personal thoughts — the rationalizations behind the actions. She knows what she’s doing. But it’s easy to see the ugliest parts of oneself in Nina, and so it’s not hard to love her. The red tide in the gulf. The gloss on her fingers. She is most endearing when she tries to earnestly heal herself and in moments of deadpan humor, which the book has in droves. At the hypnotist’s office:

“Love is a trance.”

“Is that a song?”

“A trance is an ‘inwardly directed, selectively focused attention.’ It’s a story in which you become so absorbed you can’t see anything else.”

True Love is Nina’s trance, and I, as the reader, am eerily invited into her burdensome nature. She’s not a sympathetic character, but I can’t help but sympathize with her. She is entrancing, hypnotic via the sheer volume of her predicament. True love. The red tide. Some people wade out, even in the chemical spill. Disgusting, Nina observes. “Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis,” writes Barthes. Is love a trance? Engulfment? Annihilation? Addiction? A saving grace?

Find the full review at Los Angeles Review of Books.