What’s love got to do with it? In Trent Dalton’s new book, pretty much everything

STORIES: Love Stories, Trent Dalton, Fourth Estate, $32.99

While reading Love Stories I started to get an earworm: Paul McCartney’s Silly Love Songs. I also had an urge to go and reread A.D. Hope’s The Death of the Bird because of that heart-stirring line: “Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.” It’s the kind of book that has some impact on the reader.

When the mother of a friend of Trent Dalton died, she left him her blue Olivetti typewriter. This moved him to take it to a street corner in the Brisbane CBD and solicit love stories from anyone and everyone. Dalton, Walkley-winning journalist and author of the novels Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies, set himself a huge task and his book shows that he went about it with honesty and a certain humility, getting strangers to confide, with an obvious willingness to learn and to listen. These qualities allow each story he records to be individual, distinct. It’s a Chaucerian endeavour, a rich caravanserai of real, living people with something important to tell.

Trent Dalton’s Love Stories is much more than a bag of unconnected snippets. Credit: Paul Harris

At this point we start to think of what the word “love” means, and that gets tricky because the more we observe the phenomenon, the more we accumulate information and the less we are able to produce a definition shorter than, well, a book. Dalton certainly tries to convey what love means, at times scatter-gunning images that reference belief in love as much as love itself. So we read that love is someone giving you a meaningful Cherry Ripe, or it’s a warm bowl, or it’s “the opposite of dark matter – light matter”; or it’s ambiguous, or deep, or complex or simple. Or it’s an orchid.

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The images all have absolute validity in their contexts, each person’s unique universe of experience underpinning each testimony. Dalton quotes Alex Wittmann, a counsellor who works in many areas including post-suicide support, and who offers the teleological approach: describing what love does rather than defining what it is. Wittman said that analogies help us discern what the meaning of love is: “The analogy might be, ‘Love is like the sun’. We cannot look directly at it, but we see our world because of it, and experience its many life-giving functions.”

It’s an approach exactly like Paul’s, two millennia ago, writing to the Corinthians, saying that love is kind and patient, always rejoices in truth and never ends. Like Paul and like Wittman, Dalton doesn’t say that he has love’s definition down pat, sewn up and tidy; his plethoric approach tries to cover as many bases as possible.

That means Love Stories isn’t something to read in one go; I found each of the short pieces to be an easy read, but then would find myself putting it down to have a think about what I’d just read. Love is a centenarian scientist telling of his search for knowledge, and of his certainty that science can’t define love. Love is a woman who is getting over a heroin addiction. Love is a widowed father emu caring for two chicks when his life-mate is killed. Each of Dalton’s stories implicitly invites the reader’s reciprocation; the emu story brought to my mind the recent little tragedy of the Collins Street peregrine falcons, that devoted pair raising four chicks, only to lose one to a wasting disease.

Towards the end Dalton places a short piece of writing titled The Cradle, which must be called poetry because it sings and swings competing truths without the pesky shackles of prose, scaffolded only by his love of language, his brain and heart all flashing insights. If it recalls Walt Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, all the better, because Dalton’s Cradle echoes Whitman’s and distils something cogent and universal from it, something that ends ecstatically in a sort of mystic rocking repetition: “The love … the love … the love… the love…”

All through the book he’s asking the important questions about what love means to different hearts and minds. The book is lavish with “Love is …” aphorisms that describe love for a situation, for a person, for a story, for a conversation. Each one valid for a moment; sometimes evanescent but never reductive, never cheap. Love Stories is much more than a bag of unconnected snippets; it’s linked by the author himself, his own open-hearted search shared with his wife, his contributors and ultimately with us, the readers.

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