Book Review of "All He Ever Wanted", by Anita Shreve

This book, "All He Ever Wanted", by Anita Shreve, was one I got off the bargain shelf at the bookstore a few weeks ago and just finished tonight. The basic premise of this book is that Nicholas Van Tassel, the main character who is a professor at a local college, sees a young woman, Etna Bliss, one night in the street after a fire, and becomes determined to marry her, no matter what the cost and regardless of whether or not she actually loved him back. If only he knew how high the eventual cost might be going in, he probably would not have gone the route he went.

The thing that struck me the most about this book was how the story expounded very accurately on the dangers of one-sided love, unrequited feelings, and delusions of happiness and adequacy in the face of both these things. In the book, Nicholas courts Etna for several months, and falls into passionate, addictive, immature, and unhealthy love/obsession with her. At the end of these few months, he proposes marriage to her, and though at first she declines, she eventually says yes, partially out of pity and partially because she is moved at how deeply he cares for her. That said, she does not love him and tells him this before they ever get married.

The two of them have a fine life together by day, him being a professor and trying to become dean of the college and her raising the children. But at night, it is terrible and awkward...there is no romance, no passion, nothing. Lovemaking is mechanical and forced when it happens at all. It's like the movie "American Beauty", when Kevin Spacey says, "Our marriage is a sham, a commercial for how happy we are supposed to be." Eventually, Etna pulls away because she does not love him and leaves because of some very destructive lies her husband told in his misguided attempts to keep her, and she dies apart from him.

This hits very close to home because someone very close to me just got out of a relationship that, while there was passion, etc. in the beginning, the unhealthy and immature emotional state of the relationship eventually got to her. Good, strong, healthy relationships require two healthy people who love one another from their own internal reserves of strength and feelings, not a situation where one person is a parasitic drain on the other, always taking (be it by making the other person their entire world, not contributing their share to some or all parts of the relationship, etc.) As in the book, the relationship eventually became a one-person show, where the obsessed/addicted party simply needed an outlet for his feelings and thought that simply emoting onto the other person was enough to make a relationship work. I think the book serves as a similar cautionary tale for potential relationship-goers to pursue something real, where the feelings of love and respect are mutual and shared, and where passion and romance live and grow over time instead of fading away or never existing at all. An old Don Henley song says that sometimes love just ain't enough, and that's especially true when it only travels one way.