Staff Reviews
Both utterly contemporary and a time-capsule of nineteen-seventies Soho, written in the kind of contagiously interior, manically piqued prose that starts to infiltrate the rhythms of a reader's thought, Modern Love is every bit the precocious classic heralded by this reissue. The reading is both breezy and bewildering: scenes and sentences recur to different, or the same, results, and a nutritious historical excursus on the Spanish Armada intervenes at perplexing length, only to effortlessly collide with the present. Let it illumine your commute.
— Cam
Description
"People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you'll make a name for yourself," New York-based artist and writer Constance DeJong (born 1950) wrote in
Modern Love. "They were right: My name's Constance DeJong. My name's Fifi Corday. My name's Lady Mirabelle, Monsieur Le Prince, and Roderigo. Roderigo's my favorite name. First I had my father's name, then my husband's, then another's. I don't know. I don't want to know the cause of anything."
Modern Love, DeJong's first book, was published in 1977 by Standard Editions, an imprint co-founded by DeJong and Dorothea Tanning. In 1978, the text was adapted into a 60-minute radio program accompanied by the "Modern Love Waltz," a piano composition by Philip Glass. In this new edition, DeJong's debut novel is brought back into print, her dissonant shifts of voice and inimitable staccato rhythm made available to a new generation of readers.
