A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

A follow-up to her successful debut Charleston and set in the world’s most glamorous landscapes, this moving new love story from Margaret Bradham Thornton draws on a metaphor of entanglement theory to ask: when two people collide, are they forever attached no matter where they are? Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the west coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier who has come alone to surf. Living lives that never stop moving, from their first encounter in Bermeja to marriage in London and travels to such places as Saint-Tropez, Tangier, and Santa Clara, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other. In an effort to build his firm, Christopher leads a life full of speed and ambition with little time for Helen and even less when he suspects his business partner of illegal activity. Helen, a reluctant voyeur to Christopher’s world of power and position, searches far and wide for reporting work that will “take a bite out of her soul”—refugees in Calais, a mountain climber in Chamonix, an orphaned circus performer in Cuba. A Theory of Love  captures the ambivalence at the center of human experience: does one reside in the familiar comforts of solitude or dare to open one’s heart and risk having it broken? Set in some of the most picturesque places in the world, this novel questions what it means to love someone and leaves us wondering—can nothing save us but a fall?

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 8, 2018

About the author

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for Autobiography/Memoir and the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, World Literature Today, The Seattle Review, Theatre History Studies, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a native of Charleston, a graduate of Princeton University, and currently resides in Florida.

Reviews

[Janelle Janson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Ecco Books for providing my free copy of A THEORY OF LOVE by Margaret Bradham Thornton - all opinions are my own.

Helen Gibbs is a British journalist working on a profile piece when she meets the aspiring investment banker Christopher Delavaux off the coast of Mexico. They quickly develop a relationship and soon after, get married. Helen’s occupation gives her the freedom to travel so off they go to exotic places like Saint-Tropez, Havana, Tangier, and Milan. But soon the relationship isn’t everything Helen thought it would be. They both struggle with maintaining a marriage with the distractions of their careers looming overhead.

I was captivated throughout reading about Helen and Christopher’s love story. It’s always enchanting to read about a complex relationship in exotic, gorgeous settings. I really enjoyed the swanky, glamorous scenes and the immersive world that Thornton created. I felt the tension between Helen and Christopher when the relationship suffered, which is a testament to great writing. Thornton writes with the perfect balance of intensity and subtlety that I loved, so I never felt the novel was “overly romantic”. It was just interesting going on their journey. In a perfect beach setting, everything can seem so idyllic, but it’s quite different when life gets in the way. A THEORY OF LOVE is an indulgent read with lovely prose and exquisite settings that make for the perfect escape.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Atmospheric and set in luxurious places, with various characters for whom money is no object at all. I kept hoping the story would firm up. One of the notions is that we leave our emotions in places, and ostensibly, can feel them again when back in those places. As a story of a love and marriage, it felt weightless, with flimsy characters it was hard for me to imagine. I don't need to relate to characters, but I need them to become more than ghostly outlines. The book starts with Christopher, but Helen is the main focus. Despite being a journalist/special interest writer, she was light as air, with little internal life except as it related to Christopher. And Christopher, though we are first to believe he's a surfer living a peripatetic life, he turns out to be a very smart, highly educated lawyer, going into the high-flying world of finance. He's building his company, issues arise there, that consume him entirely. There's a reach for the esoteric, the provision of detailed information about art, and mountain climbing, money laundering, various other topics, and while interesting, it seemed a way to avoid dealing with the actual story. For what seems to start out as a great and passionate love, the passion was absent completely. And while I love ambiguous endings, what I think we're supposed to believe at the end didn't ring true for me. The writing, however, was lovely and evocative, and it's what kept me reading, rather than the story itself.

[Sharon Huether · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher and Helen meet at a resort on the Mexican coast. They enjoyed each others company.
As a journalist Helen has the freedom to travel...so she goes with Christopher to these exotic places.
One day out of the blue he asks her to marry him. She accepts and they have wonderful times in European hide-aways.
Christopher has very aspiring goals in the business world. He is so focused on them, he neglects Helen.
A beautifully written novel with flowing phrases of love and realtionships.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the couple in this novel hasn’t fabricated a relationship, A Theory of Love reminded me of Glimpses of a Moon, one of my favorite novels by Edith Wharton. In it, a young couple decides to marry so that they can travel around on an extended honeymoon staying at their friends’ lovely homes. In A Theory of Love, Helen, a British journalist, meets lawyer turned financier Christopher while she’s on assignment in Bermeja. He’s there for a bit of relaxation on his surfboard. Author Margaret Bradham Thornton takes readers to Bermeja, Saint Tropez, London, Sussex, Fontainbleu, Chamonix, Tangier, Milan, Havana and New York.

She’s a journalist in the trenches and he’s interacting with financial elite. That could be why the relationship doesn’t fare well. Could also be the jetset nature of their relationship. His company is rather new and he’s working long days, seven days a week and isn’t able to invest the time in the relationship that Helen desires. Perhaps they’d have fared better if they’d worked out these logistics before marrying. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Figure out where you want to live and if you’re both morning people or night owls and if you want to have children and such.

The characteristics which attract them to each other may be the details that drive them apart in the end. I particularly enjoyed the ritzy scenes. They’re elaborate but not grossly obscene. For instance, Christopher’s mother is involved in equestrian affairs: “She finds talented working students and gives them good horse to ride, and that works for a while until she feels they have been disloyal or unappreciative, and then that relationship falters.” They attend a fancy dinner party hosted by a French businessman (he’s CEO of his family’s chemical company) and his artist wife Penelope--“She was a photographer, and while she spent more time on the decoration of her seven houses than on her photography, she had resisted the cliched hallmarks of the wealthy wife and dressed in a bohemian style.”

Helen wants everything upfront and laments that she didn’t know everything about Christopher before they married which seems impossible and also rather dull. If you already know each other than what do you talk about? Christopher is in the let’s see what happens mode. Thornton writes: “He had come to value, maybe even cherish, a sense of patience—of letting things play themselves out. Perhaps his ability to see how things would develop or unravel allowed him this equanimity. He understood that events had their own interval sense of motion.”

Thornton writes: “She was thinking about how they seemed to be moving away from each other and wondering why neither one of them tried to do anything about it. there were times when it felt as if he had lost her, as if he were thinking so intensely about what was in front of him that he would forget her, as if his mind were emptied of all thoughts of her.”

Sounds like mindfulness to me and honestly, I didn’t particularly like either character but that’s never been essential to my enjoyment of a novel. A good writer makes you continue to read despite the characters. I liked their non-relationship relationship and pondering if they’re getting what they feel they should from each other. There’s mysterious elements to it all. In addition, Christopher thinks his business partner may be involved in illegal activity and as Helen faces an unexpected pregnancy, he’s engulfed in an investigation. This novel effectively ponders attraction and love while languishing in beautiful scenery and prose. It’s a wonderful indulgence and escape.


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[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, and rounding up because of the gorgeous prose and exotic locations. This is a story of a new marriage of two solitary individuals who don’t seem to connect as they should. Helen tries to understand Christopher but maybe she is trying too hard. He is too singleminded and maybe doesn’t try hard enough.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the writing and the locales....a life we dream about but not the relationship I desire ( and fortunately have!).

[Jaclyn Cataldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great

[Dkbbookgirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant
Beautiful
An absolutely lovely read

[Abby Dart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Theory of Love is an excellent, often heart wrenching story of love, forgiveness and how we search our souls for answers..often with the painful realization that the "best answer" is the hardest path to take. Thornton builds the characters of Helen and Christopher with precision but always careful to allow us, the reader, the freedom to build our own perceptions. The author, not only gifted, has an elegant touch, a strong ability for description and provides the reader with the opportunity to travel the world with the young couple, watching as their lives merge, submerge and finally rise above only to truly find themselves.

Strongly recommend.

[Gale Verdult · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but not great. Disappointed in the ending.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, easy to read love story that immediately captivates the reader. The vivid descriptions allow you to live the story and see the magnificent landscapes while feeling the emotions within the two lead characters. A book that is gently thought provoking and leaves you wanting more.

[Nancy Hector · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this book and really liked it. Helen the main character really touched me with her determination to see the world and love in a unique way. She married Christopher a man she probably does not know well enough. They many places they travel and the struggles he has running is growing empire seems to distant the couple rather than help their relationship grow. They seem so much more in love and close when not surrounded my the interference of others who for the most part view the world in a very materialistic perspective. Could not put the book down but was disappointed at how it ended. But I am a romantic who likes a good love story.

[Gail · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had this with me on a trip as the only book to read. That is why I finished it. The writing is very stilted and does not flow well. Maybe it because I don't identify with the ultra-rich, I could not feel anything for the characters, who seemed to lack passion. One thing this showed me is that even if you live a life of traveling from one ritzy house to another, it can be drab. Or, at least it seemed so in this telling.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

"But relationships were like chemistry experiments that could never be changed back into their original form."

As the title implies, this is a story about love and the beginning and duration of a relationship. Christopher meets Helen in a fictional vacation spot, Bermeja, just as he's starting his own investment firm. She travels herself as a journalist -in fact, that's why she's in Mexico, to interview an Italian-born financier who happens to be Christopher's neighbor. They fall in love, travel, get married, travel some more, and then things get really hard when Christopher's business partner seems to be indulging in some fraudulent deals. Helen spends a lot of time alone; in fact she finds out she's pregnant and before she can tell Christopher the good news, she miscarries while on location interviewing an aesthete in Tangier.

The book's writing tone is very simple and observant; you feel what the characters are feeling but almost at a distance. I think Thornton does this on purpose because part of what is so difficult in Helen and Christopher's relationship is that Christopher is very removed.He even notes in the final chapter, after she and him have decided to divorce, that "life had emptied a place inside of him that he had not been willing to fill.... She had opened her heart wide, but he had been listening from too far away."

My favorite part was reading the descriptions about all the locations- from the fictional Bermerja to Saint-Tropez to Cuba, the book transported me out of snowy chilly New England and into sunshine and exoticism. I think Thornton does that on purpose to point out that one may be living in paradise but that doesn't heal all wounds. At the end, after the divorce is going through its paperwork and his business has folded because his business partner can't be trusted, Christopher comes back to Casa Tortuga "with nothing to do and no one to see... to come to a place where life spooled out measured and marked - where the sun rose in a slow and steady way and shadows spilled across the land - felt necessary." But he gets caught in a wave, physically gets beat up, and later that night Helen arrives and things aren't as measured or predictable.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Theory of Love adroitly describes the aspects of people—however noble they may be—that prevent love from evolving to cope with the changing currents of life. Anyone who is or has been in a relationship with a survivor of childhood trauma that has found the same traits that have allowed him to overcome the odds make it difficult if not impossible to nurture the embers of love into the fire needed to create the warmth of true closeness so many people expect from a relationship and marriage will find a piece of themselves in this book reflected back to them. The lovely descriptions of Marrakech, Saint-Tropez, Chamonix, and a fictional remote Mexican beachside community for ultra-rich aesthetes are reminiscent of the best travel memoirs. The story of lovers struggling to regain what they found in their first encounters is fluidly woven into moments of suspense whether against Mother Nature or the cruel world of high finance. Thornton’s novel is a delicate and touching story that many will find familiar but with beautiful settings and drama that pulls you out of your own life for an edifying and memorable escape.

N.B., One reviewer felt the book was “pretentious” and stopped reading. While I clearly don’t agree, I can empathize with the reviewer’s comment. The book does start in the “shallow end” but quickly progresses to the “deep end”. I would encourage anyone else with that concern to give it a few chapters before coming to any conclusions.

[Peter Sidell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is indeed a theory of love

I recently had the pleasure of hearing the author do a presentation on her work. She explained that for her, writing novels is a way of exploring questions about the human condition.
If asked most could provide a definition of love, but when in a relationship it is a more complex thing incorporating who we are or think we are, and who the other is or who we think the other is.
Contemporary psychology teaches that there are many limits to self understanding. I have come to think of love as a special kind of friendship.
Her description of the couple loosing the sense of the boundary between their bodies while in bed seems to be part of it. Still aging brings ceertain stubornneses and personality quirks to the fore so in some ways our sense of self as unique increases.
Part of love must be allowing an other to be who they are - accepting them as they are - perhaps that is what the couple is acheiving as the novel ends.
The author mentioned that she wrote several different endings for the book.
The ending she used has a bit of the lady and the tiger to it. The reader doesn’t know what will happen to the couple - do they have quantum entanglement.
For me the test of a good story is do the charactrers become real to my mind. I would say that is true in this book. The author also says one of the reasons she writes is that she likes beautiful sentences - a good foundation for any book.

[Laraine Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this, though not a lot happens. The two main characters, a couple, Helen and Christopher, travel a lot. She is a features writer and he is starting an investment company. They travel separately and together. They meet so many people. Most of the other characters are very minor, as they don't know anyone that well. Their relationship starts to have problems because of the constant separation and his job takes so much time that he is never home even when they are at home.

There are many glamorous locations with a ton of descriptive detail. Helen goes to Morocco and her day is related in great detail. Her walk through "the medina," every person she comes across, everything she eats, everything she buys, every detail is there.

[Chele Hipp · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting but predictable story that is enhanced by the settings and harmed by writing that fails to properly use pronouns and speaker identification. It was interesting to be in Helen’s and Christopher’s heads but I wish there was a little more depth to that writing. Also, the author is two for two of setting up the guy to be a dream-man matched against a charmingly flower woman at the outset. This book did a nice job of showing how that impression can fall away over time so my irritation did dissipate over that writing choice. But, in the end, the predictability of the outcomes and the less than exemplary writing were the diminishing factors.

[Pauline · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it in two days, only because it was the one book I took along on a weekend away from home. The theme it is supposed to be exploring is interesting, but the writing is not. The chapters felt like summaries of the stories they were supposed to be telling, and the characters never connected with me on an emotional level. The story just kind of drifted - rather like the Helen and Christopher's marriage. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but the point could have been made with a much more engaging story.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written, intriguing story with interesting characters set in enchanting locations. It had everything that should have made it a great book except it seemed to lack warmth to me. I never really felt much sense of involvement with what was going on. It was an easy, worthwhile and pleasant read with something to think about and, I suspect, others will enjoy it more than I did.
I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway for this honest review.

[Ramindu Thivanka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Randomly met couple ended up marrying. And then they found out its not that easy to carry out life with simplicity. It needs more scarifice and more patience to be get along the road. Indeed it is not always a happy journey. But you need to find one thing to carry out. !
With whom do you really need to be there?
What do you really need ??
What sacrifice you're ready to make for the person you love !

[Carrie Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was somewhat disappointed in the book. I felt I needed a better understanding of finance to follow the story line of Christopher. And felt much of this book was an observational story on their love. I didn't feel the passionate, complexity of their relationship, but more of a "this is what happened to this couple."

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only sort of liked this, but it was more than two stars. Very odd, lots of money, beautiful scenery sometimes, lots of isolated scenes that in theory were to add up to something. Nice writing, somewhat vague characters. I would recommend this if it is the only one left in the pile of library books and it is too rainy to venture out.

[Linh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow moving book that was okay, but also went nowhere and didn't do anything for me. It was unclear what the novel was really trying to get at. It wasn't really an examination of class or relationships; and if anything, the sub-plot (if you could call it that) around financial embezzlement was the most interesting part of the story.

[Wendy Reeve · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the end of the book I felt I didn’t know the characters any better than when I started it. I found the writing to be very stale and no flow. If you like a book filled with beautiful descriptions of all things having to do with a mega wealthy you might like this. If you like a book where you really get to know the characters then I would pass.

[Betsy · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book did not engage me. i kept reading through too many words too much description of rich people and their nonsense. finally, around page 190, there was some plot. even the end was unclear to me. i read reviews of 3-5 stars where others read this book and saw a love affair and some deep sentiment. it went right over my head.

[Nicole Sackin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different spin on the classic love story where two people meet through a meet cute moment, then fall in love and life ensues.
This telling is more realistic, with actual relationship problems thrown in but also a little lackluster and disappointing because of it.
It reminded me of Great Gatsby in the way that the characters seem to be apart from the world they live in.

[Althea · Rating 3 out of 5]

More

This story captured my attention because of the idea of memories remaining in a place and reconnecting with them when you return. The beginning is beautiful, but the tangled money-laundering/finance edges and the glitzy lifestyles were lost on me.

[Steve Amici · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminded me of The Sheltering Sky. The writing is lyrical and the novel takes on the complexities of important ideas. The ending is subtle and positive. My girlfriend read the book first and saw the ending as hopeful as I did * thank goodness!

[Caroline Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. I couldn't put it down. It is simply but beautifully written with deep empathy for characters. And don't be fooled by the ending. It makes you think about what it means to love someone.I saw delicate and nuanced ending full of hope.