Intemperance on Loving Love
Intemperance is a vibrant novel about a woman who loves herself, loves life, and goes about seeking romantic love as a means to live even more fully.
This is not a review. See why.
Context
A 55-year-old, twice-divorced sociology professor on sabbatical lives in a houseboat in Seattle—and she has decided to look for a new husband. She doesn’t plan to trawl the dating apps or hang around bars or coffee shops though; she has something much grander in mind. She decides to host a lavish party based on a tradition from her homeland, India: a swayamvar. Historically hosted by royalty, in these events suitors perform various feats, and the bride-to-be places a flower garland around the neck of the man she chooses. As a somewhat prominent feminist scholar, her public announcement of this scheme sparks lots of public commentary, much of it positive, some of it threatening or critical. As she plans the event—choosing a dress, deciding which feats the men will perform, selecting a venue and cake—she reflects on her life and relationships and learns about a forbidden love story in her family’s past. The novel is told from this unnamed professor’s point of view, and we get her experience of all this in vivid detail.
Key Ideas (Overall evaluation: good)
Love is beautiful and should be sought and celebrated
Love (for self and others) sets us free
Don’t let others’ disapproval control you
Love is beautiful and should be sought and celebrated
One of the tensions the narrator explores is between her enjoyment of solitude and her desire for companionship. She has built a life that she loves, one that includes a quiet home on a beautiful lake, a dog, and a fulfilling career. After her second divorce, she explains, “my solitude had emerged as a palliative. In the clarity it offered, I had flashes of such pain and beauty, I fell in love with me and [my ex-husband and his new wife] and the whole damn world” (239). Although she’s lonely at times, she feels deeply and lives fully—enjoying her work, her friends, her travel, her thinking time—and for years this is enough. She also develops a strong self-esteem, working on embodying her father’s advice to let the words of a poem be her guiding wisdom: “Raise your Self to such stature, that even God, before he writes your every fate, asks you, ‘Tell me, what is your desire?’ (5)” She doesn’t take this literally, but as an exhortation to reach her potential and to see herself as so worthy that her desires are not only possible but clearly driving forces that shape her life.
After years, this intense inner focus begins to recede. She recounts that, “my own introversion became my beloved until I came to desire desire itself” (12). Love and sexual desire, which she had so savored during her first marriage, are things she wants to have again. No amount of reading or soul-searching can replace them. Though she doesn’t articulate it this way, loving another person is a profound form of asserting one’s identity. It is the emotional experience associated with finding one’s deepest values and sense of life in another—an experience that’s even stronger if that response is reciprocated. In other words, her desire for desire is another expression of the love she feels for herself.
Love (for self and others) sets us free
Because love is such a self-asserting and deeply individual experience, love for a special someone or for one’s self is often essential to getting out from under the thumb of an abusive or controlling family. The courage to escape—to stand up for one’s self, to risk disapproval or disinheritance or worse—depends on believing that the beneficiary of the action is worthy of it—that you are worth it. We learn that some of the narrator’s self-love developed while processing childhood trauma, including sexual harassment. Reflecting on this journey, she tells a friend that once one has healed, “you miss [your family] some more, but you’ve also met yourself as a healed, whole person and you love her and never let go of her hand” (252). It is possible to grieve what one has lost and while cherishing oneself.
Interwoven throughout the novel are scenes from the romance of Alokendra and Heera, a story from the days when the caste system dictated a much greater deal of day-to-day life for Indians. Alokendra was from the highest caste, the Brahmin, whereas Heera was an “untouchable.” As the fate of these two lovers is slowly revealed to her and to the audience, it becomes clear that their love is the reason either of them questioned the system they were born into. Their story is presented to the narrator as a generational curse, but she chooses to take inspiration from the strength of their love.
Don’t let others’ disapproval control you
From the time she decides to host a swayamvar, the narrator worries what others will think of her decision. She fears her fellow feminists will view it as propping up the patriarchy, that her colleagues will lose respect for her, that her friends will be patronizing or condescending, that people in general will mock her as self-serving and stuck up. But she reflects that:
It has always struck me that the people who lead their lives in response to the prospective shame offered readily by their communities under the pall of What will people say? have always known exactly what people would say. The question for our lives should be What say do people have? (27)
She posts the announcement despite her concerns, then goes to a dance class—despite having a limp from polio as an infant and a serious ankle injury from a car crash.
This single instance illustrates the spirit of the narrator. She feels the natural desire to belong to groups that she thinks reflect her values. She is aware of how her actions might appear to others and how things could go wrong. She has suffered pain and loss before. But her love for herself and her desire to love others so as to most fully experience and savor life are her driving motivations. She acknowledges the risk and the anxiety, and she goes after what she wants anyway, refusing to let fear drive her. “We’re so afraid of not being loved or not being seen as loved, we’ve forgotten that we, too, have the agency to love unabashedly and wholeheartedly,” she thinks, and it is that capacity for love she chooses to honor (78). Or, as she puts it later, “only now, when I have overcome the fear of being seen by the world as the ‘unloved woman’ do I truly desire to be a woman in love” (168). When we allow ourselves to be directed by fear of what others think, we lose out on the ability to love others as fully as we otherwise could. However, as the narrator demonstrates, the experience of loving a deserving person is worth overcoming this fear.
The Vibe
This novel was bursting with life. From the rich descriptions of the ceremony to the depth of the narrator’s introspection to the waves of her emotion to the care with which she goes after her goal, this novel depicts a woman who lives her life fully and deeply, and we are invited to join her in that. There is also a touch of humor, as when she reflects that she’s done little reading thus far on her sabbatical but is unconcerned: “Oh, I know it will come back, my academic, inquiring mind, but for now, I am enjoying the intersectionality of menopause and time off” (56). I generally enjoyed the vibrancy and joy of the novel, but was occasionally jarred by unrelated political comments, as when her event coordinator wants to bring in police due to some online threats and the narrator interrupts with a call to “defund the police” (113). But these, thankfully, are few. Mostly the experience of entering the mind of a woman “immoderate in [her] lust for life” is a refreshing and invigorating one (195). Further, although the character is never named in the novel, this was not distracting to me (I only realized it when I sat down to write this Substack, in fact) because her character is so well-developed that this curious choice does not detract from the character’s realism or fullness.
Conclusion
Intemperance is a novel about a woman who loves herself, loves life, and goes about seeking romantic love as a means to live even more fully. At times it is serious and reflective, inviting readers to contemplate their own experiences with various forms of love as well as solitude. These serious moments add depth without detracting from the joy or vibrancy that characterize the novel, which reads as a love letter to, well, love.
I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, but you make this novel sound tempting!
One suggestion: For those novels you recommend, how about posting a link to the book on Amazon?