Love is Hell

The narrator of Beautiful Losers is a man consumed by his two great loves: F. and Edith. F. and Edith have slept together for as long as they have known each other. This love triangle is central driving spiritual force in the novel, for love and sex are not mere physical and emotional entities for these characters. They are revelatory experiences. However, this revelation, by and large, is more focused on the agony of the soul than the ecstasy.

F. is the sexual driving force of the novel. He prods the narrator incessantly to give himself over to pulse of humanistic outpouring in mid-1960s Montreal. These tests manifest themselves their mutual masturbation on the road to Ottawa and the narrator's anonymous fondling in the Free Quebec rally. The narrator wants to give himself over to this transcendent sexual energy, but he is frustrated. He cannot...