“Love Story”, by Erich Segal

Segal, Erich. Love Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print.

This book came up, somewhat oddly, in my research into reading for teenage boys.  I realized that the movie is the kind of classic everyone has heard of but no-one has seen, and threw it onto hold at the library just to see what the fuss was about.

The novel is slim, just 131 pages long, and not really what I expected.  In my mind the characters were vague; I knew that he was rich and she was poor, and I guess I had imagined some kind of Dickensian setting for them.  The book is set in the late sixties, though, and he is a very rich Harvard jock who went to Philips Exeter Academy (I spent a week there one recent  summer, so I was able to picture it), and she is a lower-class but intelligent Radcliffe student who works in the library.  I had dreaded cloying interactions between them, but was instead dismayed to find that the author takes the opposite tack, with them constantly insulting each other and calling each other names that we would never tolerate in my house, even if used jokingly.

My biggest annoyance with the book is the tagline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry…”, which is displayed prominently on the cover, and is probably the longest-lasting line from the movie.  I just don’t get it, and the book doesn’t explain it – why should you not have to say you’re sorry if someone loves you?

My husband and I later watched the movie together, and I believe he’s writing the review of it while I type this.  The movie follows the book extremely closely, right down to the dialogue, until the final scene.  Unfortunately I can’t go into details without spoilers, but why would you make the movie follow the book for 99% of the content, then veer off right at the end?  Erich Segal is credited as the screenwriter, so he must have either made the change himself, or at least approved it.  I’m not sure I’ll ever figure it out, but it certainly left me with a bad last impression.