Love is not an antidote to Capgras

I came across this today in The Echo Maker by Richard Powers:

"Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random." (268)

"Capgras," for those of us who are not mental health specialists, is a medical syndrome that (according to whonamedit.com) consists of a "delusion that a close relative or friend has been replaced by an impostor, an exact double, despite recognition of familiarity in appearance and behaviour." Mark, in the novel, thinks that his sister is an imposter, pretending to be his sister. And in the section quoted above, Mark's sister Karin is trying to sort out her feelings for her supportive and doting boyfriend. Later, she tells the boyfriend, "Leave me alone. Don't touch me... Don't you see yet? I'm not her. I'm just a simulation. Something you invented in your head." We readers see that Capgras, if not contagious, is more normal than we thought 100 pages earlier. At the same section of the book we see the famous Doctor Weber might be diagnosable, too. Maybe Capgras is a condition of love, or at least "a form of it."

How's that?! Love is a form of creating and denying the other? You mean that, sometimes, you don't really know, or recognize the ones you love? Sometimes you reject them? Hmmm. Disturbing, yes, but not absolutely unfamiliar thoughts.

Distrubing, unsettling thoughts. But such mental disturbance is why we read good books. You think you know what a word like "love" means. You think it seems unambiguous. You think what love means: roses, romance, retirement, or: forbearance, sacrifice, support. And after reading this kind of passage, you begin to realize that your "loving" relationships are much more... uhm... diverse than the original picture you'd created. Maybe we do "forget" and "create." And, after reading, you think that either you're not in love, or love is bigger, or different from, or more unwieldly than what you thought it was before you read.

That's what novels can do: make you rethink what you hold to be natural or obvious.