SOURCE: Grossman, Judith. “Infectious Disease.” Women's Review of Books 14, no. 1 (October 1996): 11-12.

In the following review, Grossman examines the narrative structure of Love, Again.

Doris Lessing has pursued her fictional explorations of sexual passion for a remarkable forty years and more, beginning with her “Martha Quest” novel sequence and the stories collected in The Habit of Loving (1957), and continuing into the present with Love, Again. Her theme now is the erotic vitality of a woman in her sixties, as a reality that defies all cultural bias against its acknowledgment To acknowledge is one thing, however, to value the reality is another, and the words used to signal its emergence here—“a sweet insidious deceptiveness,” and “a poison”—sound a clear warning that trouble rather than fulfillment lies ahead.

But was Lessing ever a liberated celebrant of the body's joy? Looking at reviews of her early work up to...