Love That’s Blind Ends All Too Predictably

When Jane Austen began “Pride and Prejudice” with the proposition “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” far from asserting a universal truth, she was exercising her gift for elegant irony.

As she (and many other women) knew all too well, handsome, rich, single men were not always eager to wed, no matter how desperately everyone in the neighborhood with eligible daughters would wish them to do so. And, although the wealthy single men in her novel do indeed end up married, this comes about, not in illustration of a maxim, but as a result of the complex, subtle, delicate and deep interplay of motives, characters, emotions, manners, behavior and ideas that enable the would-be brides and grooms to emerge as unique souls rather than specimens of sociological stereotypes.

Nowadays, however, many novelists begin with preconceived sociological nostrums in mind, and proceed simply by applying these nostrums to the characters and situations. List the ingredients of a given novel, factor in the therapeutic wisdom readily available from therapists, gurus, 12-step groups, advice columns or self-help manuals, and you’ll figure out what will happen--and why--without help from the novelist. The characters are textbook illustrations of types, the plots little more than workings out of the theory. Which is just another way of saying how formulaic so much of today’s fiction can be.

Although novelist Elizabeth Berg has an engaging voice and style (direct, pared-down, intimate, casual), her novels exemplify the current tendency of fiction to aspire to sociology. Her latest novel, “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” takes two widely accepted truisms and proceeds to confirm they are true: that there is nothing as wonderful as a mother’s love for her child; that a woman who marries a gay man in the hope he’ll go straight is, to put it gently, barking up the wrong tree.

Far be it from me to gainsay either of these generalizations, which, even if not true in every case, still sound like fairly good guidelines. But do they really need to be spelled out yet again in a novel about a young single woman who longs more than anything for a baby, talks her gay friend whom she’s always dreamed of marrying into siring her child, only to find that she was foolish to imagine that he might change even if she was right about wanting a baby?

*

Which is not to deny that this novel makes for pleasant reading. Our narrator and heroine, Patty Murphy, is appealingly vulnerable, prepared to follow her heart to the detriment of her common sense, and downright cute in a childish kind of way. “The reason I didn’t marry any of the various men I might have is always the same: Ethan Allen Gaines. I fell in love with him in sixth grade, and I have never, never stopped loving him. . . .” Although Ethan has told her he is gay, Patty can’t switch off her feelings.

Always a bridesmaid, never the bride, Patty bemoans the increasing scarcity of good men on her horizon. Ironically, when Ethan helpfully fixes her up with a man who, even she has to admit, is ideal husband material, Patty nips her budding romance in the bud: He’s just not Ethan. But when her best friend Elaine catches Patty’s rejected suitor on the rebound, Patty is jealous. When Patty asks Ethan to father her child, she assures him she doesn’t expect him to marry her, but she still can’t help hoping he may.

Like many a young heroine of contemporary fiction, Patty knows the score, yet remains oddly untouched by what she knows. Or, as she puts it, she knows in her head but not in her heart. One can certainly sympathize with someone in this kind of predicament. But watching the characters go through the motions of a story that does little more than prove what everyone already knew at the start is not what you’d call a profoundly moving or enlightening or even hilarious reading experience.