As the novel opens, an unnamed forty-year-old man meets a pretty girl at a hotel bar at four o’clock one afternoon in the 1950s, and lonely and cynical, and looking to connect with her, he promises to tell her a story. He confesses, however, that “I don’t know anymore, what things signify; I have difficulty now identifying them; a sort of woodenness has come over me,” a “woodenness” which leads him to use her as a passive sounding board while he relives his previous relationship with another woman whom he believes he loved. What follows are the random maunderings of an insensitive man who has no idea who he is or what he is doing, and since he is the only speaker in the novel, the primary listener to his story becomes, in effect, the reader, rather than the pretty listener at the bar. Alfred Hayes’s brilliance as a writer and careful observer of human nature is challenged to its limits with this novel with only one speaker. Despite the flawed and uninteresting main character, however, Hayes succeeds in making the speaker’s situation intriguing enough that the reader wants to know whether he gets his well-deserved comeuppance, whether he learns anything, or whether he simply moves on to another lover. Outstanding novel.
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Alfred Hayes, an almost-forgotten author who wrote this book in 1958, spent much of his career writing screenplays, both in Hollywood and in Europe, and he uses the skills he developed in writing for films to great advantage here. His economy of language, a necessity for great film scenes, allows him to develop a novel in which the reader becomes a participant, imagining the dramatic pauses in dialogue, the tones of conversations, and the words a character does not say at times in which s/he might be expected to reveal something crucial. As a result, this brief novel, close to a novella in length, is so evocative that upon reading it for the second time, the reader gains even more appreciation of the author’s technique – and his brilliance. His control of both his material and his literary objectives is absolute, his writing style is flawless, and he never has to resort to literary trickery to keep the reader focused on two characters who, despite their lack of uniqueness are, nevertheless, emotionally exposed to the reader and for all the world to see.
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Whenever art lovers see “The Center of the World,” J. M. W. Turner’s masterpiece, for the first time, all are stunned by its power. Some of these viewers come close to venerating the painting in a religious sense, as they spend hours staring into it and experiencing the waves of pleasure that accompany every viewing. Because of its very nature and the powerful sexuality it exudes from within, however, it is a painting that the patron and the artist never expected to be shown publicly. A mysterious painting which vanished almost immediately after it was finished, the ‘The Center of the World’ is indeed the hub of this novel’s wheel, drawing everything else into it as the novel unfolds through several different points of view. On its surface, Thomas Van Essen’s debut novel is a quest to find the missing painting, but the novel is more than that. It is also a study of ecstasy, what creates it, and what enhances it, in art and literature (and even, indirectly, religion) and in real life. The novel’s various points of view, in time periods extending over the course of one hundred fifty years, illustrate the history of this (probably) mythical painting from its creation to the present, convincing the reader that it is both real and as powerfully seductive as was Helen of Troy herself.
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I am so sad that I have finished this collection of stories and must finally write a review. In fact, I actually read this book twice, but writing the review is like saying goodbye to people I may never see again, and these characters feel real, familiar, true to life, and ultimately memorable. I am not by nature a sentimental person – in fact, I may be more like some of the characters in this book than I am willing to admit – so this reaction is not characteristic. And when I say these short stories are among the best I have read since Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and then add that they are so clean, neat, and perceptive in their style and presentation that they remind me of those by Andre Dubus (the father), I am not exaggerating. Kane’s stories are sensitive, psychologically astute, and filled with observations that will expand your own viewpoint, maybe even allowing you to see yourself in new ways. The title says it all. Each character here (and some of them repeat in several stories) is facing an event which may change his/her life significantly. As the characters’ stories unfold, each person comes “this close” to having a life-changing revelation, only to have the opportunity escape them, in most cases, through their own inactions, as they turn back to the comfort of the familiar and the habitual, or as they ignore the possibilities.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, England, Experimental, France, Germany, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, US Regional on Mar 3rd, 2013
This novel is definitely not science fiction. Instead it is a wide-ranging novel about just about anything that comes into the author’s head, told in glorious and inglorious imagery throughout. Though it is set almost entirely between 1931 and 1939 and does trace the idea of teleportation as a motif throughout the novel, it is really the story of Egon Loeser, a young set designer at the Allien Theatre in Berlin who is determined to do something spectacular with his life. A proponent of the New Expressionist theatre as a reaction to realism, Loeser is, quite frankly, the “loser” that his name suggests, almost totally lacking success in the area of paramount importance to him – sex. As the novel jumps wildly around in time and place, Loeser becomes involved in a series of crazy episodes as the action continues and continues, ricocheting around through time and space, incorporating vivid stories. Characters are killed and disemboweled, their hearts removed; and ghosts appear and reappear, with one character breeding ghosts for use in a machine which they will power. Virtually everyone gets blackmailed about an assortment of crimes, and one character stays busy selling the skeletons of Troodonians. This novel is unique, one requiring a good deal of patience, and even fortitude, at least for some of us who are significantly older than the twenty-seven-year-old author.
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