A love story spins out across the space-time continuum
If you’re looking for an unusual love story that spans decades, that feels modern but has an old-fashioned heart, then Madeleine Henry has written a book for you. “The Love Proof” is no ordinary romance novel. Although it unabashedly embraces sincerity and kindness, Henry’s writing also contains intellectual as well as emotional heft. Her first novel, “Breathe In, Cash Out,” was a romantic satire set on Wall Street, where she once worked as an investment banker. But in “The Love Proof,” she takes a very different tone as she tests – with unique and surprising depth – what it means to follow one’s heart.
Sophie Jones is a delightful conundrum of a character. Her parents discover early on that their introverted child is a brilliant math prodigy and, indeed, Sophie blossoms into a famous physicist even before arriving at Yale University. She’s pegged as the next Einstein, and renowned mathematicians predict that “she would be the one to answer humanity’s legendary questions about space and time within the decade.”
Jake Kristopher faced more difficult circumstances on his path to Yale. “He read SAT prep books as if they were maps showing the path out of jail,” writes Henry. His passion is finance – until he meets Sophie, when a connection ignites during their first conversation, and the two feel as though they’ve known each other forever. The connection places them in “a world of their own where time passed at a different rate, maybe not at all.”
This love changes them both. “The best [Sophie] could describe it ... was that her energy had shifted down from her head and into her heart. She was on another wavelength: genuinely content,” writes Henry. But Jake is haunted by guilt as Sophie loses interest in reaching her full academic potential. “She had the same passion, the same intellect; they just weren’t fueling a goal,” he worries. “He’d always loved her mind, but her lack of ego was keeping her from using it.”
When Sophie suffers personal loss, physics becomes an avenue for her to scientifically prove that love profoundly impacts human existence. “Block theory claimed that all events in the past, present, and future existed at once, frozen in a ‘block’ of space-time,” writes Henry. “Everything that had happened or would happen was actually occurring now. The theory was perfectly captured in Einstein’s words, ‘For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’”
There’s a metaphysical side to Sophie’s intellectual search for meaning – a feeling that underpins the entirety of the novel. Rumi, one of Sophie’s favorite poets, sums it up precisely: “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
“The Love Proof” is a literary journey in which time is filled with meaning, purpose, and caring. Through the arc of Sophie and Jake’s romance, Henry demonstrates that the expression of love is the most important undertaking.
