22 Minutes of Unconditional Love
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Daphne Merkin meets the formidable challenge of describing female lust and romantic obsession with all the desired daring, candor, and skill. The result is a bracingly honest, keenly insightful, utterly compelling book.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
A harrowing, compulsively readable novel about breaking free of sexual obsession
A novel of unsurpassed candor, punctuated by bold ruminations on love, marriage, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love depicts one woman’s psychological descent into sexual captivity. This is the story of the extremes to which she will go to achieve erotic bliss—and of her struggle to regain her soul.
As Daphne Merkin’s audacious new novel opens, a wife and mother looks back at the moment when her life as a young book editor is upended by a casual encounter with an intriguing man who seems to intuit her every thought.
Convinced she’s found the one, Judith Stone succumbs to the push and pull of her sexual entanglement with Howard Rose, constantly seeking his attention and approval. That is, until she realizes that beneath his erotic obsession with her, Howard is intent on obliterating any sense of self she possesses. As Merkin writes, his was “the allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice.” Escaping Howard’s grasp—and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control—will test the limits of Judith’s capacity to resist the siren call of submission.
Narrated by Judith in a time before the #MeToo movement, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold the past has on us and the way it shapes our present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Merkin's ambitious and erotic tale (after her memoir This Close to Happy) looks back on 1990s New York City to chronicle an obsessive, torturous love affair between Judith Stone, a young book editor, and criminal defense attorney Howard Rose, 13 years her senior. In Judith's third week of mourning the death of her psychiatrist, whom she was in love with, Judith meets Howard at a party and is immediately drawn to him. They embark on an intense sadomasochistic relationship, which Judith initially resists, then allows Howard to push her boundaries. Judith remains captive to Howard's "allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice and always on the verge of melting away," and Merkin includes copious, repetitive descriptions of their sexual encounters. Merkin captures Judith's distinct perspective as a single woman working and dating in the early '90s from two levels of remove: first, in a prologue with Judith's narration a decade later and then in a series of authorial "Digressions" ("Peekaboo, I see you, out there in the world, holding this book"), in which Merkin muses on the nature of women's submission and desire, and the viability of writing a novel. While inventive, these interruptions fail to achieve a new formal approach and shed too little light on the depth of Judith and Howard's relationship. Merkin's tale has its moments but falls short of her better work.
