BOOKS
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in the form of a screenplay : early cinema is a central metaphor of the
novel- a metaphor of naive but powerful transformation of life into
art - as well as a central locus of narrative . Narration is the work of
several characters, from widely diverse points of view, across
cultures (French, German and American), and through the whole
length of twentieth-century history. The story is beautifully em–
bedded in, and consonant with, Guerard's moral vision of that
history. Evocations of time and place - Berlin on the eve of the Great
War, Houston in the teens and twenties, postwar Paris, mid-century
Mexico-are in themselves intensely pleasurable, and the characters
seem to come to life at discovering themselves to be the point of such
vivid evocations. One particularly recalls son Charles's comic-erotic
sexual coming of age in the Parisian twenties, and mother Christine/
Annette's search for Charles's father, her former husband (a futile
effort to ascertain whether he is really dead at last) through a sur–
realistically imagined Mexican hinterland, into the "village of the
blind." These parallel searches for lost time are not allowed any
Proustian fruition; in fact, Guerard uses fiction's formal resourceful–
ness to debunk, here in the late twentieth century, that utopian mod–
ernist credo of the redemptive power of art.
The Object of
My
Affection,
Steven McCauley's first novel, is
warm, full of love, and a delight to read. Like Guerard, McCauley
manages to avoid sentiment and easy pathos while delivering the full
emotional impact of desire.
The Object of
My
Affection
is written in the
great American Huck Finn-Holden Caulfield tradition of comic,
self-deprecating first-person narration that works by showing a great
deal more than its innocence tells. This is a well-made novel, charm–
ing us with a wit that develops at the same time the protagonist's
problematic self-effacement, and entertaining us with a group of
fully realized New York settings: the Upper West Side of Columbia
graduate students, "brownstone Brooklyn" at the intersection of new
gentry and old ethnic working class, a yuppy East Side private
school, artsy SoHo, and those New York outposts, post-hippie rural
Vermont and the parental suburban house frozen in the fifties
childhood of the narrator's late baby-boom generation.
What goes on in these deeply satisfying settings is a story of a
significantly but not fully unravelled sex-gender system. The pro–
tagonist is a young gay man in the midst of a series of varyingly self–
destructive and unsatisfying affairs who becomes involved with a
woman. "Affairs" and "involved with" are sufficiently vague to cover
