‘The Reinvention of Love’ by Helen Humphreys

Reviewed by Valerie Compton

In The Reinvention of Love, Helen Humphreys has once again given us a fiction set in history—and once again, she tells an intimate story in prose that easily seduces. But Reinvention is aptly named, for Humphreys has renovated her style in this novel, and just as with her formally innovative story collection, The Frozen Thames (2008), the result is a book that is subtle and surprising.

Reinvention is the story of writer Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, of his friendship with the poet and novelist Victor Hugo, and of his passionate affair with Hugo’s wife, Adele. The novel is set in the mid-1800s, farther back in history than Humphreys’ earlier novels, and is more deeply concerned with character than setting or social observation. For readers accustomed to admiring, even languishing in, Humphreys’ skill in the creation of historical time and place, Reinvention may feel like the work of another writer. But to me, it feels like a step forward—the natural development of writer who has been maturing into a confidence that character alone will sometimes carry the novel. Here, even details that sound like historical fact work in service of character. “I love your perfume,” Adele says, and we remember that in the nineteenth century men wore scent. Later, when Adele reveals that Sainte-Beuve dresses as “Charlotte”—ostensibly so that they may meet secretly, but also because both he and she enjoy this gender role reversal—the perfume returns and attaches to Sainte-Beuve: a significant feature of his character.

Reinvention is a very single-minded book. Its concern is almost entirely with the world of the love affair between Adele Hugo and Sainte-Beuve—this affair is an entire world—and more precisely, with Sainte-Beuve’s attempt to understand the meaning of love, as he and Adele have uniquely experienced it.

This hardly sounds like a satisfyingly active premise for a novel. But the scope of Sainte-Beuve’s question—What is love?—turns out to be vast. By the time we have heard Sainte-Beuve’s story, Adele’s, and that of her daughter Dede, we will have covered two generations and crossed the Atlantic. Sainte-Beuve himself will have changed dramatically.

When we first meet him, Sainte-Beuve (known by his surname even to his mother) comes across as an insufferable egotist: “When the senior editor asked me to shorten my article, I objected. I am only a junior writer at the newspaper, but I am much more intelligent than anyone else there, and sometimes I just can’t pretend otherwise.” Unsurprisingly, this failing of character gets him in trouble. He is dueling with his editor by page two.

Humphreys’ comic treatment of Sainte-Beuve and his peccadillos is one of the delights of the first part of the novel. The opening duel between Sainte-Beuve and his editor devolves rapidly into farce, then ends with the combatants sharing a picnic. Later, Sainte-Beuve offends a terrible young poet. “Choose your weapon,” the poet says, and Sainte-Beuve responds: “I choose spelling. You’re dead.”

Soon enough, though, the novel becomes more serious. Sainte-Beuve’s first answer to the question, What is love? Tragedy.

With Adele Hugo, Sainte-Beuve’s life is bliss. Each has very particular requirements in a lover, Sainte-Beuve because he has a physical “secret” and Adele because she wishes to be in control in the relationship. They are a perfect match. But they cannot last.

When Sainte-Beuve carelessly admits to his friend Victor Hugo that he is in love with Hugo’s wife, Hugo is hurt and enraged. Sainte-Beuve immediately apologizes, but he is not sincere. “Mostly I am sorry I have told him.” Hugo moves his family, first across Paris, and then out of France. For decades, he keeps his wife and children imprisoned on the Channel Islands.

The greatest tragedy of these events is for Adele, who is crushed by solitude and by Hugo’s controlling behaviour. Because Humphreys has given us Adele’s story in her own distinct voice (her sections alternate with Sainte-Beuve’s) we have an intimate portrait of her suffering, and another view to juxtapose against that of the unreliable-sounding Sainte-Beuve.

But is Sainte-Beuve unreliable? His egotism (this is a man who admires Napoleon Bonaparte) does not speak in his favour. But Humphreys seems to be saying that love itself makes people unreliable.

It is in Sainte-Beuve’s answers to the question What is love? that Humphreys really shines in this book. It’s a question her novels have been compelled by from her first, Leaving Earth (1997). That the central question is more closely examined here, in plainer prose, against a starker background, argues compellingly that this is Humphreys’ strongest novel yet.

Everything, at the end, comes down to character. The young Sainte-Beuve believed that love is “a backwards swoon down a darkened staircase.” The mature Sainte-Beuve concludes, “Love doesn’t fail. We do.”

The Reinvention of Love is a refreshingly grownup novel: confident, reflective, luxuriously unhurried. And what, in this madness that is the digital age, could we possibly need more than that particular combination of traits?