With Love Songs (1972), Lawrence Sanders, once dubbed "America's Mr. Bestseller", delivers a strange, flawed, but compulsively readable psycho-sexual family drama.
Although the book is somewhat typical of the 1970's - there's plenty of kinky sex, groovy dialogue, characters walking around everywhere in bare feet, and a lot of existential talk about the meaning of life and love - unlike Sidney Sheldon, Irving Wallace, and others of his contemporaries, Sanders has a singular, fascinating authorial voice and a talent for smooth and confident prose, which have made his books age better. His books don't feel like they've just come off the assembly line (like the books of James Patterson, for instance), and there's a fevered, obsessive quality to his writing that is endlessly fascinating.
Love Songs, an uneven, dated novel, shouldn't work. The characters are mostly unlikable, and some of the dialogue is so purple it's almost funny. But work it does. This is an unputdownable book, and one which tells a bizarre, atmospheric tale of love, hate, drugs, and violence. A lot of what goes on here is implausible and psychologically ambiguous, but damn if it's not fun to read about.
If you're new to Sanders, this is not the place to start. A better choice would be one of his Deadly Sin books, or Capital Crimes, a superbly entertaining update of the Rasputin story.
Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2019.
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