... at once love story and annihilation tale ... reminds that we are all always proxies of ourselves, many places at once and also nowhere at all — hovering in the deadening buzz betwixt invisible infrastructures ... The luster of True Love lies in its ability to hold a tenor, a mood so much so that it becomes a character, living and breathing. Nina herself is not a particularly likable character: she lies, cheats, puts others through grotesque amounts of pain. As the reader, I feel chosen, as I’m invited into Nina’s most personal thoughts — the rationalizations behind the actions. She knows what she’s doing. But it’s easy to see the ugliest parts of oneself in Nina, and so it’s not hard to love her...She is most endearing when she tries to earnestly heal herself and in moments of deadpan humor, which the book has in droves ... She’s not a sympathetic character, but I can’t help but sympathize with her. She is entrancing, hypnotic via the sheer volume of her predicament ... That she watches herself get engulfed, knows intimately the nature and temperature of her engulfment, is what propels the book forward alongside the faux containers of contemporary life: cold technological pits, dumb plastic jars, phones filled with lies, partners, search engines, plastic aftertastes and heat.
... about as far from a standard rom-com as a book can get. It’s acerbically funny and sharply observant, but this tale of romance among millennials is more bleak than bubbly ... Gerard gives readers an unflinching look at the grim economics of being a struggling artist of any kind.
Gerard has an unusual way of depicting Nina’s romantic travails. Her prose is invariably muted, laconic, written with an acerbic deadpan that runs counter to Nina’s baroquely self-destructive behavior. Although Nina is the narrator of True Love, she spends very little time actively reflecting on her own misdeeds; the novel has a churning, forward momentum and Nina functions more as an impartial observer ... One of the book’s innovative features is how it depicts Nina’s text-message exchanges in a bold font, differentiated from the quoted dialogue. In any given scene, Nina’s consciousness is always triangulated, shifting between herself, her dialogue partner in the room, and a third party with whom she’s communicating via text message. This stylistic innovation brilliantly captures the way contemporary technology bifurcates our brains into different conversational tracks, one running in the real world and the other running virtually. When she’s texting or sexting, Nina’s desires are given free rein, often in hilarious contrast to the mundane reality she’s inhabiting at the moment...Yet True Love is at its most original and interesting where it diverges from Resnick’s analysis and begins exploring the trials and tribulations of America’s 'precariat' class ... Gerard captures the dynamic of a failing relationship with lacerating honesty—made all the worse by the challenges of working freelance in the dystopian era of late-stage capitalism ... a fascinating read for anyone looking to understand the world we’ll inhabit when the smoke of the Trump era clears—in particular, the world that’s being left to young people. It’s unclear, however, if True Love offers any hope. Maybe, the violent ending to Gerard’s novel suggests, it isn’t Nina who’s in the trance. Maybe it’s America.
It’s all funny until it’s not ... capitalism looms threateningly in True Love, compounding the pain ... women are unable to reach their potential, professionally and personally, because of the crushing grind of making rent in New York and the foreclosure of a livable wage for writers and academics ... By the end...I was anxious for [the protagonist] to take loans from daddy and get the hell out of New York, and depressed that I felt that way ... True Love is too much of a send-up to sting...but for all its excesses, the bleak vision it presents does, too, feel depressingly real: Nina can’t see a way out of her abusive relationship because she can’t afford to move or live alone ... It is heartening to see...characters want for more than what the world has to offer them, instead of reacting to their circumstances with yet more ennui and anomie. But...it is the women—and not the systems they operate in—that are ultimately painted to be the cause of their own problems ... True Love enact[s] what it feels like to be worn down, not just by the world and its economics but by the way we choose to move through it. That is a worthy function...to invite us into feeling each woman’s precariousness, to understand both its systemic and personal roots. If we are still waiting on a book about women living in this era where fixing, getting better, is more than just a fantasy, perhaps we are still waiting for a world where it’s possible to fix.
There is a reason that all the men seem similar or like cardboard—this book is not about them. They don’t really matter. They are there to function as sounding boards for Nina ... Gerard resists giving us a Lancelot moment with Nina—no knight in shining armor shakes her, Nina doesn’t run off to another relationship. We never see Nina get free; but there is hope of her doing so—or at least a moment in which I choose to see hope. The last scene of the novel is simple and devastating. It leaves Nina in a liminal space, and how we read, what we choose to imagine happens next, will say a lot about what we think love is, and what it isn’t.
In this smart, dark riot of a novel...Nina moves in and out of relationships with unavailable men at lightning speed. It’s a great distraction from the lack of traction in her writing career ... Her cast of ex-boyfriends is a treat to read for its abject messiness ... Nina’s search for love, fulfillment, and demonstrative success becomes a scathing critique of modern hustle culture and the privilege of making art.
Gossip, sexual desire, and the uncompromising economics for aspiring artists guide the action in Gerard’s lurid, captivating tale ... Nina’s defiance against labels and mansplaining as she works through her pain on her own terms adds an arresting feminist layer. Gerard’s unflinching look at youthful desperation marks an exciting turn in her work.
Nina is a brilliantly observant narrator, able to take the caustic material of her squalid living conditions and her increasingly abusive relationships and render it with a precise insouciance. Yet, though Nina’s primary quest is for self-knowledge, she turns every possible insight into a reiteration of what she already knows best: the shape of her ravenous need. The problem, both for Nina and the novel, is that nothing she creates out of her experiences treads beyond the well-worn paths of her narcissism, rendering the narrative static and all the characters who are not Nina into indistinguishable props for the performance of her selfhood ... A book that occasionally provokes introspection but mostly founders under the weight of its own gaze.