When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.
Charles BaxterShort story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
Charles BaxterThe problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.
Charles Baxter