MixedThe New Republic...a kind of collective memoir of falling in and out of love with a political movement, of losing faith in the vindicating power of ideology ... Romance holds a fresh appeal for readers who came of age in a post–Cold War world in which socialism has lost much of its stigma, and who perceive a newly urgent connection between ideology and inner life ... Romance is a color portrait against the black-and-white rhetoric of the Cold War, and Gornick’s thoughtful criticisms have nothing in common with the invective of professional anti-Communists. Still, she depicts a party that was disturbingly authoritarian ... heavily seasoned with psychoanalysis ... Gornick’s intrusive narrative approach reminded me of a heavy-handed psychoanalyst who brings everything, relentlessly, back to the Freudian menu, denying the possibility—the freedom—of speaking about big ideas without relating them to the specifics of childhood. Sometimes a cigar-maker is just a cigar-maker ... Romance shows that psychoanalysis and political history don’t always mix well. The psychoanalytic focus on drives tends to empty the content from political commitment.
