William Boyd takes on war and espionage in 1913-1915.

I read a review of this latest novel by William Boyd, and it sounded great.  It turns out he’s written many more, and I may just have to read them all!

Waiting for Sunrise

Waiting for Sunrise (368 pages, Harper, $26.99) tells the story of the young and handsome Lysander Rief, who is making his way, in the footsteps of his illustrious father, as an actor in the West End in London in the early years of the twentieth century.  Lysander is a bit of a poet as well.  With a deep acquaintance with British Theater—he acts in Shakespeare and Strindberg in the course of the novel—and a literary bent, we are treated to delightful prose, snippets of Shakespeare and other playwrights, as well as a thoughtful narrative that sets a high standard for sophistication.

The novel opens, however, with Lysander in Vienna in order to consult with a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s about a sexual problem he has been unable to overcome.  His psychiatrist tries to get him to try various methods of overcoming what causes his dysfunction, but when he meets a British woman who is seeing the same doctor, he is immediately attracted to her, and before long they are having wild sex that more than proves that he has been cured.

Because this woman, Hettie, is involved with a Viennese man, Lysander is playing a dangerous game, and when the affair blows up in his face, he has a hard time even escaping from Vienna in one piece.

The British diplomats who help him escape, well-spoken and ironic in their ways, turn up again in London, just as the First World War is starting.  And they engage Lysander, who is a private in the Army, to take on a project that invovles traveling to Geneva and acting, or so it seems to Lysander, like a spy. 

He does this successfully, and then he is dragged into even more difficult challenges closer to home.  When Hettie pops up again, and he finds himself having to deal with his loving, but twice widowed mother, he has more than he can stand.

All along we hear about the theater and the people he knows there, and that theatrical background creates a welcome counterpoint to the war wounds and the espionage.

William Boyd has written an elegant thriller that does far more than other recent examples of this genre can do.  He paints a rich set of characters and puts them in complex relation to one another, and he informs us about the cultural context in which they were functioning in the nineteen-teens.  This is a wonderful accomplishment, and I look forward to reading Boyd’s other novels soon.


















William Boyd  

Waiting for Sunrise is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Edward St. Aubyn writes an epilogue to his Patrick Melrose trilogy.

I think of Edward St. Aubyn as a guilty pleasure, but they are wonderful novels, and I feel guilty only because they make me laugh so much.










At Last

Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last (272 pages, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $25) follows up with characters from his Patrick Melrose trilogy. I imagine that if you haven’t read those novels, some of the details of this one might confuse you. At the same time, though, you can catch on fairly quickly to the identities and relationships being described. This novel is such a delight that you might find your way into the trilogy by starting with this epilogue.

Patrick’s mother has died, and the action of this novel takes place during the one day of the funeral. To be even more precise: at least half the novel takes place at the funeral itself. Of course, characters flash back into their lurid pasts, and long held animosities are given the space to emerge naturally. Wicked characters we may remember form earlier novels are even more wicked, and perhaps a little demented, here; but old friends are still friendly; and family represents everything that is best and worst about the ways in which people can be loving and/or tormenting to each other.

For Patrick, a bundle of self-defeating neurosis, this is a chance to assess his relations with each of his parents. His Dad has been dead for some time, but the occasion of his mother’s funeral is the chance for him to delve into his past. And he does that with a vengeance, remembering horrifying scenes from his earliest childhood, some of which, like his at-home circumcision, may have been related to him by the mother he is mourning.

Patrick’s ex-wife and his ex-mistress are both there, exuding long-standing and perhaps understandable hatred for each other. His wife’s ex-lover, a loopy philosopher is there too, as are various friends and hangers-on, aunts, and even some old, old friends of his mother's.

In the last novel of the trilogy, a much loved French Riviera home had been left by his mother to a new age religious group, and when this novel opens Patrick is still brooding over this loss and blaming his mother’s dementia. The woman from this group has been asked to speak at the funeral—Patrick’s ex-wife Mary had to make the arrangements when Patrick couldn’t cope—and her much-interrupted funeral oration is a masterpiece of comically ironic prose. This character does not mean to be funny, but I defy you to read her touching account of a well-lived life without laughing.

You will have to laugh too at other characters and at the amazing descriptive pirouettes that St. Aubyn pulls off here. The novelist has been widely praised as a stylist, and the style is just about everything here. It’s the kind of prose you can sink into and marvel at from paragraph to paragraph. It’s almost addictive to read, and I imagine that it is addictive to write too. That gives me hope that there might be even more volumes of Patrick Melrose to follow. After all, two of the most amazingly charming and astonishing characters in this novel were Patrick’s two little boys.

  

Edward St. Aubyn  

At Last is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Hilma Wolitzer writes about romance in retirement.

When I read that this was a story about a widower who is dating in his sixties, I thought it sounded interesting.










An Available Man

In An Available Man (304 pages, Ballantine Books, $25), Hilma Wolitzer tells the tale of Edward Schuyler, a young sixty-something who lost his loving wife to cancer. After seeing her through the illness, he is exhausted when she dies, and his grief takes the form, as it often does, of his pulling back from the world and brooding over the past in utter privacy.

Edward has friends and family who won’t put up with this, however, and no sooner is he dragging himself unwillingly to a grief counseling group, than he finds they are trying to fix him up with friends and encouraging him to pull himself together.

One singularly unsuccessful venture in this regard is when his best friends, or rather when the wife of this couple tries to fix him up with a cousin of hers, both Edward and the woman, who’s called Olga, withdraw and resent the exercise. This is funny to read, perhaps because it will be familiar to anyone who has been on a “blind date.”

And as if this is not enough, his children—they are really his stepchildren from his wife’s first marriage—take out a personals ad in the New York Review of Books and delight in watching him sort through the responses, which are many, even if the dates that result are as unsuccessful as that first blind date.

While all this is going on, Edward thinks back to his first love, the woman who captured his heart and then left him standing at the altar. When she turns up in his dating pool, he is at first angry, but then they start to rekindle the love of their youth.

This is not the end of the story, though, and Wolitzer is not the novelist to end things this way, and she doesn’t.

What does happen is too wonderful to relate here—it would spoil the ending—but I can say that Wolitzer finds a way to give Edward a new life without his having to relinquish his memories. This is beautifully done.

What is also beautiful is the way in which Wolitzer creates the feeling of loss and emptiness that a man in his sixties might feel. Still alive and wanting to feel intimacy, Edward is unable to respond even when he wants to. All this is evocatively told, and I found this touching and memorable on the topics of love and loss.

Hilma Wolitzer

An Available Man can be purchased at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Michael Knight writes about Americans in Japan immediately after WWII.

Of all the war stories I have read over the years, I do not think I have ever read one concerning the American occupation of Japan immediately after WWII.

The Typist

Michael Knight’s The Typist (208 pages, Grove Press, $14) tells the story of Francis Vancleave, a timid guy from the South who learned typing from his mother and then found himself, at the close of the Second World War, being sent to Tokyo to work with MacArthur’s occupation forces.

Van, as he is called, lives in barracks with men who fought in the Pacific, and he feels a bit self-conscious about his non-combatant role. He makes friends with Clifford, his roommate, and although Clifford urges Van to take up with a local girl, as he has done himself, Van stays true to his young wife at home, even if he puts her out of his mind for long stretches as a time.

Clifford has a few scams with shady local characters, but Van manages to keep out of the worst of all that. He does go out occasionally with Clifford and his girl, who is an exotic model in a local department store. He also makes friends himself with some of her friends, even if he feels self-conscious in doing so.

Even more upsetting (and rewarding) to Van is his involvement with MacArthur and his family, coming after glimpsing MacArthur’s seemingly lonely son one day when he was at the general’s house delivering some materials that he had typed. When he hears that this boy Arthur’s birthday is approaching, he sends him some toy soldiers. Not long after this, MacArthur comes to the young man and asks him whether he would be willing to spend time with his son. MacArhtur likes Van’s southern accent, and he prefers that his son pick that up rather than the affected British speech of his tutor.

Van and the young eleven-year old become friends, and Van starts to look forward to his Saturdays at the MacArthur house.

Complications arise when Clifford is discovered to have been consorting with communists. As part of the fall-out of Clifford’s impending arrest, Van is asked to stop his visits to the MacArthur boy.

As Van’s world in Tokyo starts to collapse, he nevertheless finds the opportunity to attend a football game that MacArthur stages on the site of the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima. There is some historical truth to the staging of this football game, but as Knight explains, it actually happened in Nagasaki. MacArthur was trying to establish a new spirit of cooperation on the site of mass destruction, but for many who attend, especially including Van and the young Japanese girl who accompanies him, the effect is nearly devastating.

This bittersweet mood suffuses the novel, and Knight has created a masterpiece of restraint and understatement. What happens to Van when he returns home and his success, or lack of success, at setting up his life there is beautifully told.

Knight tells a wonderful story here, and a reader comes away feeling that the depth of feeling that results is more than one might have anticipated.

Michael Knight


The Typist is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Mark Merlis takes on Washington

After enjoying two of Mark Merlis’s novels, I decided to try a more recent one.

 





Man About Town

Mark Merlis’s Man About Town (288 pages, Harper, $3.95) attempts to tell the story of a gay man who works as a legislative analyst in a conservative Democratic administration. Joel Lingeman, suddenly on his own when a partner of fifteen years walks out, tries to come to terms with the closeted Washington scene.

As we witness Joel’s unsuccessful dating and his dull forays into local bars, we also hear about some of the work he is doing in Congress, especially work on a homophobic bill that tries to remove Medicare benefits from AIDS sufferers who had practiced unsafe sex. At first dismissive of the bill, even as he helps a Western senator to put it together, he finds himself caught off guard, when the administration takes up the plan, and Joel finds that he has to try to undermine it in some way.

While Joel is having these professional qualms and feels all the frustration of meeting closeted gay republicans who are both smart and handsome, he fantasizes about an image he once saw. The image was one of a fetching young man in a bathing suit ad, who seemed to be inviting intimacy, at the back of a magazine of the 1960s called Man About Town.

As Joel’s immediate gay life in Washington seems to go nowhere—men he meets and even those he dates seem to do nothing but disappoint him—he becomes more and more involved with the fantasy of the young man in the ad. He even goes so far as to hire a private detective to see whether he can discover the whereabouts of that young charmer.

As the contemporary world becomes more frustrating, both professionally and personally, Joel retreats into the fantasy and follows up leads until he is ready to confront that young man, now some forty years on.

The results of this quest are not at all what Joel expects, if he expects anything, nor is his response anything but surprising.

Joel is an interesting character, but I lost sympathy with him and could not really follow him into this fantasy, even when Merlis used it to point at a reasonable moral. I felt that Joel was an unsympathetic and depressive character, and Merlis let him go too far into his fantasy. There might have been a life for him in Washington, but Merlis wouldn’t really let him look for it.

Man About Town is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Mark Merlis rewrites a classic.

Because Madeline Miller’s novel was so engaging, I decided to go back and read Mark Merlis’s novel on a similar theme. It was just as delightful as I remembered from reading it in the 1990s.








An Arrow’s Flight

Mark Merlis’s own novel about the Trojan War is called An Arrow’s Flight (384 pages, Stonewall Inn Edition, $15). In this novel, Merlis tells the story of Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who emerges after that hero’s death to take part in the destruction of Troy.

Merlis rewrites that legend in a fascinating way. Pyrrhus is a young go-go boy/hustler who has escaped his island home to come to the big city, where he lives a 1980s gay life but at the same time seems to be following the plot of an ancient epic. All the details of this urban existence, including the clubs, the other go-go boys, and the smitten roommate, are told with wit and precision.

Almost out of the blue, as it were, an older man, a eunuch called Phoenix, comes to find him and persuade him to fight in the Trojan War. It has been foretold, it seems, by the oracle, and Pyrrhus decides to give up the wild life and see whether he can become a persuasive soldier.

Before going to Troy, though, Odysseus needs to stop along the way to try to persuade Philoctetes also to join the campaign. This soldier had been left behind on an island because of a wound that would not heal. And when they approach the island again, they decide that the handsome, young, demigod Pyrrhus should try to seduce him into returning to Troy.

Philoctetes illness very quickly seems analogous to AIDS as it existed in the 1980s and 1990s: a slow wasting disease in which a sufferer feels always a little more exhausted and rarely able to shake it for more than a month or two at a time. When Pyrrhus meets this older man, he falls in love for the first time. Merlis tells a beautiful story of the emotional awakening of Pyrrhus and how much trouble it causes him.

Merlis uses his classical frame and the characters of the Iliad to tell a story all his own, and a wonderful story it is. If you read it with a knowledge of the Homeric source, it is an utter delight. But even if you know very little about Homer, you can find this story surprisingly moving.

I am pleased to have read it again, and I recommend it for anyone interested in recent gay fiction. This is one of the great novels of the 1990s.












Mark Merlis

An Arrow's Flight is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Madeline Miller writes of Greek Love with passion and verve.

I heard about this modern-day Mary Renault from a friend, but this writer is far more riveting and, I would say, poetic than her predecessor. This is a novel to celebrate.









The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller is a classicist who is obviously intrigued by the story of Achilles and Patrochlus which is familiar, primarily, from Homer’s Iliad. On the quite substantial material in Homer, Miller weaves a wonderful tale. The Song of Achilles (378 pages, Ecco, $25.99) is beautifully written and so finely crafted that one almost takes Miller’s fictionalization as historical fact.

What we do know is that Achilles and Patrochlus are depicted as loving friends in Homer’s poem. When Achilles is sitting out the Trojan War because of a violent disagreement with Agamemnon, Patrochlus tries to persuade him to fight. Eventually they hatch the plan that Patrochlus will wear Achilles armor in order to inspire the soldiers. When he does so, he is killed by Hector, who thinks he is killing Achilles. Achilles’s anger at Patroclus’s death is unbounded, and it leads him back into the war, where he kills Hector and is later (as predicted) himself killed by an arrow from Paris.

Miller tells that story compellingly. All of this is told in detail in the Iliad, but Miller has a gift of narrative that makes us pleased to hear her version of these events. Even more fascinating, though, is Miller’s creation of a rich backstory, based primarily in the myths surrounding these characters, but also adding imaginative and compelling details of her own.

The story is told primarily from Patrochlus’s point of view, and his growing self-awareness, coupled as it is with growing attraction toward his friend and benefactor, the handsome and golden-haired Achilles, is compellingly rendered. Miller also tells about Achilles’s attraction to his friend, and deciding, seemingly quite sensibly, that this intimate friendship can only have involved physical intimacy as well, she tells this side of the story with poetry and restraint. The love she describes is something very beautiful, and its beauty is in keeping with the character of her protagonists.

Complicating the love between these two young men is the angry disapproval of Achilles’s mother, the goddess Thetis. Thetis has grand plans for her son, and a male lover does not figure into her plans. Because of her animosity, she tricks the men about what she sees as their fate. Playing into her hands, they hardly realize how effectively she has taken control.

All the other character of this classic drama of war and betrayal are effectively drawn, from the huge and almost unthinking Ajax, to the Greek commanders, Menelaus and Agamemnon, and even to the Trojans, Priam, Hector, and Paris.

Madeline Miller has written a novel that will open these stories to a new generation of readers. If readers go no further than this novel, they will have learned a lot. But if it sends them back to the original epics, then that is even better. What a marvelous novel this is.















Madeline Miller

The Song of Achilles is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.