‘The Course of Love,’ by Alain de Botton

Over the years, Alain de Botton has published 11 nonfiction books that dispense accessible philosophies and insights that can be easily applied to modern life. From “How Proust Can Change Your Life” to “The Architecture of Happiness,” the author has spawned an empire of sorts from his musings and meditations for the School of Life, dedicated to “developing emotional intelligence” via therapy, books, courses and even a gift shop, and Living Architecture, which commissions vacation homes in the United Kingdom designed by contemporary architects that can then be rented by the public.

Before de Botton’s spectacular elevation to international best-selling self-help personality, he began this notable journey as a novelist. In 1993, at age 23, he published his debut novel, titled “On Love” (in Britain under the title “Essays on Love”), which follows the failed one-year relationship between the narrator and a young woman named Chloe, who meet on a flight from Paris to London.

A majority of the narrative is dedicated to the protagonist’s psychological unpacking of the relationship’s demise and the precarious nature of burgeoning love. The book became an immediate sensation and launched the author’s career.

Fittingly, de Botton returns with his second novel, “The Course of Love,” which offers up a novelistic bookend to his debut. Similar to his first novel, “The Course of Love” explores the emotional facets of a couple, Rabih Khan, son of a Lebanese civil engineer and a German flight attendant, and Kirsten McClelland, a Scottish woman who was raised by her schoolteacher mother after being abandoned by her father at a young age.

Instead of dissecting a romance of the short-term variety, this narrative extends over 15 years, probing the institution of marriage and its many predictable corollaries (read: parental exhaustion, lack of spontaneous sex, financial worries, middle-age bewilderment, marital digressions) — and how the love of this particular couple endures and matures over time.

At the start of this assured novel, the reader meets Rabih many years earlier, at age 15, when he is on vacation near Malaga, Spain, with his father and stepmother (his mother had died of cancer when he was 12). Rabih fleetingly falls in love — or perhaps, more aptly, becomes infatuated — with a young girl from Clermont-Ferrand, France, before she abruptly departs this seaside resort.

De Botton writes at the end of the opening chapter: “It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic — wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates — are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. ... He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.”

At age 31, Rabih meets Kirsten through a work-related project, and the reader learns the story of their early romance — tea at a empty Indian restaurant, an afternoon spent at the botanical gardens, a bike ride to the beach. They court for six months before Rabih proposes on a train after visiting her mother in Inverness.

Largely told in an omniscient third-person voice, the narration takes on a stereophonic quality, with both husband and wife commenting on the ever-shifting allegiances of their love, commitment and struggles. The author deftly delivers both sides of the marriage, exploring the incompatible interplay of romantic love and practical love.

Similar to his first novel, de Botton intercuts the narrative with philosophical reflections on the nature of love (set off by italics), fabricating a kind of fragmented manifesto on marriage. This technique and the detached third-person voice create both microscopic and wide-angle perspectives on this one relationship.

At times, the philosophical overlay informs the characters and their actions, and during other moments, the italicized interjections read more like interruptions of heated scenes of conflict and ardor.

“The Course of Love” is at its strongest when the author excavates and distills the psychology of the characters during the everyday scenes of marriage. Often, a quiet beauty and authenticity emerges on the page.

For example, when Kirsten is pregnant with their daughter, the author writes: “While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality.”

Part literary novel, part self-help handbook, “The Course of Love” certainly illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle fissures of one modern marriage and what it takes for two people to stay together through the years. Despite some of the narrative contrivances, this nontraditional novel is generous in its spirit and message.

De Botton invites the reader into the heart of this marriage — in all of its flaws and affections. At the novel’s end, one is left cheering for Rabih and Kirsten, and the future possibilities of their lives together.

The Course of Love

By Alain de Botton

(Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; $26)