Paul Hollander, Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America

Excerpt

There are at least three reasons why Paul Hollander has decided to publish a book which, at first blush, seems so different from his previous writings. One could assert, as Hollander himself explicitly does in the “Preface,” that romantic love and communist political systems share several themes in common, among them being the difference between appearance and reality, illusion and imagination, and trust and deception, to name but a few. In short, there is a great deal of advertising and/or propaganda in both. Or again, conversely, one could argue that a scholar of the horrors and misunderstandings of the twentieth century is perfectly suited to study its apparent opposite. Just as Socrates gets Polemarchus to admit in the Republic that the just man is both the best guard as well as the best thief, so one could say that Hollander’s efforts at describing and analyzing the shocking brutality of communism as well as the shallow (yet fashionable) pretensions of anti-American intellectuals make him a fine candidate to study and discuss the pining idealism of contemporary romantic love. Or finally, one might suspect, as I am inclined to believe, that Hollander simply wanted to have some fun—and fun indeed he must have had if he enjoyed writing the book as much as it was enjoyable to read. The number of sly observations, witty rejoinders, and outright guffaws that are in store for the prospective reader are too numerous to chronicle, and it would not be fair to reveal some of my personal favorites here. …