Little bit of love doesn't go far enough

ALL ABOUT LOVE: New Visions By bell hooks MORROW, 240 pages, $32.95

Pay attention to bell hooks. The American writer and cultural critic is becoming a household word in this time of emergent spiritualism, transformation and life-changing epiphanies. Last year's book on writing in hooks's life, Remembered Rapture,was like most of her work: well-grounded, articulate, and artful. This year's collection of essays is All about Love: New Visions,

Hooks's writing typically inspires, enlightens and provokes. She is an academic wild card, the brilliant feminist whose sharp mind can slice the latest scholarly shibboleth. We have learned from her about racism, sexism, visual politics and teaching as a transgressive activity. Now, she has turned to the subject at the centre of her own spiritual longing: love. As a child, she claims, she was cared for but did not truly know love. For years, she chose father substitutes as lovers. With this collection of essays, she turns her heart toward a search for the inner rapture to feed her spiritual hunger.

We hear about those who have wisely listened to her advice, her observations on Bill and Monica, her brush with suicide as an adolescent, and the deep wounds she remembers from critics and friends who have betrayed her. Along this journey, she tosses in bon mots, briefly and often, from a crowd of contemporary new-age thinkers, pop psychologists and scholars.

Reading the book often feels like being in the movie-queue scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall: You just never know who is going to pop up with a timely comment. Joining hooks here are Martin Luther King, Jack Kornfield, Judith Viorst, John Bradshaw, Sharon Salzberg, the Thomases Moore and Merton, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Matthew Fox, among others. In fact, it is M. Scott Peck, of the pop-psychologyclassic The Road Less Travelled,whose words ended hooks's years of searching for a meaningful definition of love: "the will to extend oneself for the purposes of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

On parenting, hooks claims: "There was nothing utopian about the way problems were resolved on Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons -- we were witnessing loving parenting, loving households." On creating community: "We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting . . . by doing a kind deed." On patriarchy and romance: "Even in non-heterosexual relationships, the paradigms of leader and follower often prevail, with one person assuming the role deemed feminine and another the designated masculine role."

These are snippets only, and out of context, but they are telling. Writing this book may have been important to bell hooks's journey to embrace love, but reading it may not inspire ours. Hooks reckoned this work would be met with derision and denial. But it is not a discussion of love we are unprepared for: It is a series of finger-wagging soapbox homilies from one of North America's most respected cultural critics.

As one who has admired hooks's thinking for years, I only wish she had taken a constructive critic and an editor with her on this journey. What forces bring a book to publication with syntactic clunkers, pillow-biting clichés and dangerous generalizations? When the author is a woman who considers writing an act of grace, what impulse drives her to settle for prose that does not reflect her love of craft?

Hooks has always bristled at critics. She pre-empts a challenge by naming it before the reader can, and considers criticism of her work to be a form of racism, sexism or backlash. Often she is right. But here, those who have been inspired by her courage may sense, as I do, that these ideas needed more time for reflection, more seasoning, more respect -- or is love? -- for the crafting of their expression and for the intelligence of her readers.

This is hooks's 17th book. Her pace of production mirrors the rapid growth of her audience. But love is a tough topic. And creating new visions, like deepening our spiritual understanding, takes time. Lorri Neilsen is a writer and professor in Nova Scotia. Her latest collection of essays is Knowing her Place .