This short novel is set in NYC, (people, apartments, streets, work) and in the Catskill region as experienced by NYCers, (cute shops, trees, lakes, natural beauty). The time, 1990-91, is set by the first gulf war and the first President Bush. This sets a vague yet palpable atmosphere of outer danger, especially after a character is eliminated in a sudden newspaper headline kind of way.
This novel is not so much about plot. The heart of the novel is perhaps a look at desire and connection between individuals and the connections and desires those impulses lead to. The plot elements come in to illustrate the power and consequences of these emotions, the plot serving the characters rather than story for its own sake. Is this what makes a book literary fiction rather than, genre, crowd pleasing pop product?
But wait!
But wait!
The novel centers on a handful of interrelated characters, plus a wildcard. There is a feeling of passage from youth, a time of personal movement into middle-age. Death is looming, but in outer danger, suicide, and world events, the news, rather than the dull slow terror of old age and natural passage. The fear is centered in not so much personal physical decay, but the mid-life feeling that you are basically here for awhile if not taken out by accident or some other random outside of the self occurrence. Or some madness.
There is a male-female couple of a not explicitly specified age gap. Large enough that his sister felt entitled to label it, “jail bait” or some other slur. He is a writer of perhaps little worldly success, yet not without some means, some purchasing power for things like trips to Europe and connections offering summers in the available empty country place. She has a job, so it is not all framed in the rich old guy - gold digger young thing, cliche.
So perhaps they have a gap of as much as 20 years.
The age gap is not so much of an issue as the variation of their longings, desires. She has a healthy eye for other men, looking anyway. No harm in that. Still she is not exactly contented. Not entirely sold on this relationship. And, that guy over there looks hot.
He seems to be settling, older.
His desire, longing, is to bond with his 20ish nephew in an innocent dad like way.
His desire, longing, is to bond with his 20ish nephew in an innocent dad like way.
The wildcard is a character who attaches herself to the young woman in the age gap couple. She seems of another class, or at least sinking, brought down by her compulsive overeating and obesity, into a living as a freelance apartment cleaner. The lack of physical beauty and hardly-getting-by type of job would perhaps put her at a different economic status than her object for connection, the woman in the apparently privileged couple. Economic issues of separation are not explicitly the business of this novel, so her character can represent a self one could become with a little age, hard luck, and doubtful choices, all of which are easy to come by. This character could be seen as a harbinger of an undesirable future for the young woman she is attracted. Or the person who is sinking into quicksand and might just pull you in with her if you offer a hand. Contaminated by insanity, hard luck, poverty, or a combination of those. Insanity and poverty might be catching. It could be some strange telepathic viral thing, it’s transmission still unknown.
The kind of literary poetic quality of the writing, with focus on the characters, allows one to forget plot for a pleasant spell getting aquatinted with the tapestry of these desires. We get to know Wildcard in this way and it ends up that she is chaotic enough to drag the others into plot weather they like it or not.
There is a nicely staged climax by the summer lake when the individual desires clash and the literary novel reader awakens from that dream and finds themselves on noir alley.
Satisfying read.
I came by this novel in a rather odd social media connection way. I got curious and I’m glad I did.
