The Secret Lives of People in Love

What a wide range of emotions and feelings that the reader experiences reading The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy, an adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts, right down the street from NYU! (Maybe I’ve passed him on the street.)  The book contains nineteen short stories outlining situations of missed loves, loves that no longer exist, missed opportunities, and ships that connect in the night.  There were certain themes that returned time and time again.  During some stories I was saying to myself, “déjà vu? Didn’t I just read that story?"  Many of the characters were carbon copies of each other with repeating story lines, but with different characters.  I started to fall asleep a bit as the stories unfolded and I neared the end of the book.  To be honest there were only 3-4 of the stories that actually moved me as someone who does love others.  My favorite was the story (As Much Below As Up Above) of the man who was asked to leave the submarine to help the tug pulling it, and then the submarine falters and all of his friends he left behind die.  The story captures how “happenstance” things really are and one person’s survival is just a lucky turn of fate.   In Little Birds, a young girl separated from her parents at age three (she gets on a train by accident as her parents watch her disappear) and never see them again.  She lives with the owner of a porn shop who plays the role of parent and puts together a whole new story of a life for her. Is it a film of fiction that he now creates for this young “dove” or is it real?  And my favorite of all, Snow Falls and Then Disappears, a pretty picture of how two loves connect on another level when worlds don’t always intersect, a man married to a deaf woman.  Emotions are hard to create among readers and I think Van Booy’s book is very much hit or miss.  The nice thing is that the stories are short enough that if you don’t like, no worries, it is almost over.  I’d say read the three I suggest, the others, only if you have some extra time.  Disappointing overall.