In Love, by Alfred Hayes.
It’s the wrong week for it. It’s been just colder and lonelier than I’d like–uncomfortable, bright, windy–which means that I maybe didn’t mean to spend the weekend reading a contemporary paraklausithyron, and I don’t know who recommended this to me in the first place. It’s a beautifully shadowy book, a story with nameless protagonists that appears in black and white, set in 1930’s or 40’s New York. It very realistically could been read as the dysfunctional denouement to the goofy, hopeful Paperman (which I liked. reservedly): Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, I guess.
There’s our man, 40’s, a writer, content to have his loneliness eased and his evenings occupied, maybe a bit of a failure. There’s our girl, 22, beautiful and vaguely melancholy, loves tarot cards and afraid of living alone in the city, divorced with an off-screen daughter, 4 or 5 already. She is unable to “gouge out…her own private ingot of happiness,” until, enter the rich guy, Howard, a friend of a friend who offers her $1,000 to go to bed with him.
The story is in motion. We know how it ends.
This seed having been planted, our writer watches her slow, drifting absorption into another life, pulled into orbit by the undeniable honeyed gravity of financial security. They break up and he hates her, he suffers (“I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios.”), wishes he could “really cultivate some impressive vice.” It’s almost boring, until she calls him back. Their spontaneous vacation to Atlantic City is the miserable, grating climax of the whole thing–with a backdrop of wrong hotel, wrong furniture, raw nerves, and bad sex (…rape? It’s neither no-means-no nor yes-means-yes, but horrible to read), we watch hopeful reconciliation harden into fatigue, annoyance, old resentment. They drive home the silent five hours home in the middle of the night. She’s gone, “happily bedded down with a textile company and a couple of chemical subsidiaries, which of course wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to say.”
There’s an economized metonymy throughout–you want to use terms like gem, novella, and refined–but I’m not sure if the end result of all this craftsmanship is anything but the flat deep impression of bleakness. The images that remain are the sexual elisions–the curl of hair in the bedsheets, the horrible discovery of toothmarks beneath a black turtleneck–but stronger by far is the feel of sulky antagonism.
Could you even write a book like this, now? So much is different, but, on the other hand, so much still boils down to money, feeling safe.
Beautiful. Total downer. Maybe bad to read in the pre-spring underworld weeks of March, and, warning: if you’re an overactive empathizer, you a) might have to guard against letting the antagonistic sulks bleed into your real life, and b) will hallucinate an old boyfriend somewhere in public exactly one (1) time while reading.
