Samuels: Too Much Love

“Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority,” the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wrote in their 1962 Port Huron Statement, expressing their optimism toward man’s potential to govern his own life and change his world in the face of racial discrimination and the existence of the Bomb. The students in SDS were confident that they could obliterate the loneliness, estrangement, and isolation that separated man from his neighbors and engage the citizenry in a new conception of democracy.

But the optimism of the 1960s has long since passed and the belief that man can rule his own life is only an unrealized myth, David J. Samuels ’89 tells us in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” In the preface to this new book—which consists of a decade’s worth of his essays that have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker—Samuels informs readers that his story “has something to do with our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch, which is much the same thing as believing in the future.”

From the start, Samuels makes it clear that his mission is to show what has happened to us, the generation raised long after the optimism of the ’60s has waned. According to Samuels, we are like children, scared and ignorant of what makes our world work. We all want or need to submit to a higher authority.

But while Samuels does an astonishing job conveying the sense of malaise that affects our lives, his book, at times, feels like little more than a compilation of the author’s best clips. Though they show that Samuels can write almost everything about almost anything, the book’s somewhat haphazard construction obscures his message about how we can live the good life—or, at least, how it is that we’re failing at it.

Samuels begins his book with a preface that invokes the words of Tom Wolfe when he writes that there is something about “the warp of American reality that resists the rule-bound nature of fiction.”

Indeed, it is hard to see how Samuels could pen a novel that included all of the adventures that he throws together here, including his three-day stint at Woodstock ’99, a tour of an atomic bomb test site in Nevada, a profile of Bill “the Spaceman” Lee, and his personal ruminations on his marginalia of Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey.”

Samuels’ tone—balanced between sarcastic and vulnerable, innocent and disillusioned—invites the reader to connect with his text. No matter what he’s discussing, Samuels writes non-judgmentally and makes it possible to identify with his subjects, even if that person daydreams about using his knowledge of demolition for acts of terrorism. Samuels universalizes his subjects, presenting a world that is no longer governed by God or tradition, one in which his subjects struggle to reconstitute a shattered belief system and grapple to find meaning. When writing about a rehabilitation program, Samuels presents addiction as a metaphysical problem in nature: “addiction is a symptom, more urgent and dramatic, perhaps, of the constraints inherent in the human condition. The source of these constraints—our souls, ourselves, the chemistry in our brains—is hard to put a finger on.” It is times like these, when Samuels thinks through print, that allow readers to form a connection with the text.

But because Samuels rejects a structure that would flatten out the ridges in the absurdity of American reality, he often meanders and digresses; some essays don’t seem to fit in the book’s overarching theme at all. While reading the essay about Super Bowl XL in Detroit, I was not at all sure how describing Stevie Wonder as a “playful, gigantic black baby who has absorbed all terrestrial sounds and language in a single gulp” or Aretha Franklin as a “300-pound mountain of congealed hurt” was at all relevant to his broader message about anomie.

However, when Samuels errs on the side of vulnerability, it’s hard to deny the anxiety that he feels about living in a world in which certainty has dissipated. “Why bother? Why get married? What are families for?” he asks his readers. “What was new about these questions was that they didn’t have answers, or that the answers they did have were so multiple and contingent and arbitrary that they never really felt like answers at all.”

The problem with “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is not that Samuels fails to tap into the palpable uncertainty that regulates our lives, but that he overloads us with extraneous phrases and superfluous essays and so violates our need for order and regularity. Ultimately, with Samuels’ book—much as in life—we are left clinging on to particular moments that we find significant and pocket-sized absolutes.

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.