THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT: Sex, Shopping, and the...

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT: Sex, Shopping, and the Novel by Alain de Botton (Picador: $13, 326 pp., illustrated). De Botton’s ruminative novel depicts an ill-fated love affair between two British yuppies. The narrator discusses the characters’ behavior and its implications, bolstering his arguments with sources that range from “Madame Bovary” to Aretha Franklin. After savoring the author’s droll analyses, the reader understands why Alice consumes romance novels (“Her attraction was not naively based on the assumption that stories were happy, but rather that they had some sense to them”) and why Eric identifies his values “as the center of a monotheistic universe.”