How do I love thee, and thou me? In spurts, it would seem: spurts of language on Twitter and Blackberry, of bodily fluids on the Showtime series Californication, of arterial spray in the vampire shows that have besotted the nation’s high-school girls (and more than a few of their mothers).

As a theme, though, love requires the longer look that only a film or play or novel can provide. As it happens, love is one of three top literary themes, the others being death, and what, if anything, happens after death. Yet death can be handled pretty quickly. As maestro Lorin Maazel once said, “The idea of dying is like a joke or a literary device. It’s not all that bad. So you fall into eternal sleep. So what?” As for the afterlife, you’re either fer it or agin’ it, so there’s no point arguing with the idiots who don’t have the same grasp on truth that you do. Ah, but love is the ultimate roller coaster in life as well as literature. You make eye contact with someone, and zoom!—up you go. Months or years later, you have a tiff about money or religion or the in-laws, and zap!—down you fall. Eventually you end up back where you started, and then the ride begins again. But this takes time, and hence a certain quantity of ink. Love can’t be grasped in its entirety in the 140 characters of a tweet or even in the 14 lines of a sonnet, though Lord knows many a tweeter and sonneteer has tried. You need at least a couple hundred pages to talk about love—800 pages if you’re Russian. You need the novel, or what D.H. Lawrence called “the one bright book of life.”

Two great contemporary English-language writers, one on this side of the Atlantic and one on the other, have novels of recent vintage that promise to tell us something we don’t already know about love. Let us look at Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Philip Roth’s The Humbling, then, and let us see them not only in the context of these authors’ other many and varied writings, but also in terms of what we ourselves know about human beings and the ways in which they adore and despise and exalt and destroy each other. Because a novel isn’t an instruction manual for life; a novel is your life. It toddles along beside you long after you’ve finished it, and it does all the things you can’t do, not to mention many things you can. And it is in that gap between the familiar and the new, and between the should and the shouldn’t, that we live most intensely. Sure, I like movies and operas and 1950s pop songs and Keats’s odes and even Californication, for that matter, but there’s no better, more intimate companion than a novel.