It's revealing how tied up in some conceptions a writer who wants to break through others can be ... or is it just that this was an early work?

In the case of Purposes of Love, I think it's both. It's very clumsily handled because it was her first novel, but she really believes that the constantly shifting equilibrium of the early stages of the relationship must sooner or later resolve once and for all: one of them must be the more loving one, which means something rather darker and more dependent for Renault than it does for Auden. It is a construction of the world with which I don't agree, but it also feels particularly cruel in light of how—in the broader rather than specifically gendered senses—non-binary those early stages were. All possibilities collapse. Like I said the first time I read the novel, I wasn't necessarily expecting the romance to work out, but the author pulls so many artificial strings to make her point, it just feels unbelievably over-engineered. And I am left unpersuaded.

I *love* that, whereas the next paragraph you quote is so full of unanchored abstractions in convoluted dance with each other that I just had to back away and leave it to its maneuvers.

Hee. I understand what the passage is saying, I just think it's wrong.