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This is a simple book. The story is briefly described: an aging, widowed British author becomes obsessed with a young American movie star and contrives to meet him. It is short: the copy that I read is fewer than 140 pages. It has no elaborate structure, Adair having even foregone the use of numbered chapters.
I’ve been mostly offline lately—since about December of last year. It’s been one of those periods wherein I think that after this current hurdle, I’ll surely get back to Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and fandom… but that event passes onto the next and the next and the end result is that I need to reckon with having lost the habit. Reading for pleasure has seen a shade of that, too. I’ve finished a couple of books (The Book of Life, Kitchin; Autobiography of Red, Carson) and parts of two others (The Farewell Symphony, White; The Woman in White, Collins), but I’m definitely reading less and I’m less excited to spend time on it. When I’m home after work and dinner, I want to sit on the couch with my spouse, YouTube, and a knitting project. My mind can’t seem to handle the demands of reading or writing, and all I can summon energy for is keeping my hands busy.
This is a long way around say thing, with my spouse traveling this weekend, I wanted to read a simple book and finish it. That was neither of my reads-in-progress. I heard about Adair because he wrote the introduction to the reissue of a Forster novel—I must find a copy of that essay—and I picked this novel of his on a whim.
It is simple reading, but clever, and with attention to its primary character so as to make the reading rewarding. Adair draws a priggish, unselfaware man for his narrator. This makes his inner monologue at times a chore to read (his vocabulary is intentional obtuse), but watching him unravel in his obsession is at turns amusing and horrifying. It’s a sketch of a bad ending resulting from extreme repression—not only of the sexual kind, but social and emotional as well. Our narrator (mostly nameless, as the book is written in the first person) has few friends. They all date from his days as a promising undergraduate at Cambridge. His stable writing career and family wealth could be the basis of a comfortable life, but in his unwillingness to connect with other people, he’s made a tomb of them. When a series of circumstances lead to him accidentally watching a teen flick at the cinema, thus introducing his fascination with the actor Ronnie Bostock, we see at first not the way that the obsession will consume him but rather we see the neglectful way he has treated the world for some three decades. He has a naïve, juvenile understanding of his own culture, stuck somewhere before his adulthood, perhaps in the Edwardian times of his revered Forster.
The unfolding obsession with Bostock somewhat modernizes him, but more devastatingly, it forces him to leave his tomb. He confronts his sexual attraction to men by recalling how he’d never engaged in even the slightest fumbling during his “undersexed” school years. He’d thought of himself as boringly heterosexual, though one wonders whether he ever achieved any degree of passion for his wife. He’s a man who cannot masturbate to completion, and the impact of all this pent-up inability to self-examine is the finale of the book in which the narrator travels to America and engineers a confrontation between himself and the subject of his obsession.
Throughout, Adair shows the depth of his narrator’s self-delusion in a really compelling way. The narrator is a British writer of a certain age—it would be unbelievable to not show him as introspective. But his introspection never solves anything. It’s very effective writing of a deeply troubled, intelligent man, and it’s very sad.
I’m not sure if I want to read any more from Adair soon—this was very anxiety-provoking by the end—but I’m glad to have read this one. I recommend it to fans of character studies.
I’ve been mostly offline lately—since about December of last year. It’s been one of those periods wherein I think that after this current hurdle, I’ll surely get back to Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and fandom… but that event passes onto the next and the next and the end result is that I need to reckon with having lost the habit. Reading for pleasure has seen a shade of that, too. I’ve finished a couple of books (The Book of Life, Kitchin; Autobiography of Red, Carson) and parts of two others (The Farewell Symphony, White; The Woman in White, Collins), but I’m definitely reading less and I’m less excited to spend time on it. When I’m home after work and dinner, I want to sit on the couch with my spouse, YouTube, and a knitting project. My mind can’t seem to handle the demands of reading or writing, and all I can summon energy for is keeping my hands busy.
This is a long way around say thing, with my spouse traveling this weekend, I wanted to read a simple book and finish it. That was neither of my reads-in-progress. I heard about Adair because he wrote the introduction to the reissue of a Forster novel—I must find a copy of that essay—and I picked this novel of his on a whim.
It is simple reading, but clever, and with attention to its primary character so as to make the reading rewarding. Adair draws a priggish, unselfaware man for his narrator. This makes his inner monologue at times a chore to read (his vocabulary is intentional obtuse), but watching him unravel in his obsession is at turns amusing and horrifying. It’s a sketch of a bad ending resulting from extreme repression—not only of the sexual kind, but social and emotional as well. Our narrator (mostly nameless, as the book is written in the first person) has few friends. They all date from his days as a promising undergraduate at Cambridge. His stable writing career and family wealth could be the basis of a comfortable life, but in his unwillingness to connect with other people, he’s made a tomb of them. When a series of circumstances lead to him accidentally watching a teen flick at the cinema, thus introducing his fascination with the actor Ronnie Bostock, we see at first not the way that the obsession will consume him but rather we see the neglectful way he has treated the world for some three decades. He has a naïve, juvenile understanding of his own culture, stuck somewhere before his adulthood, perhaps in the Edwardian times of his revered Forster.
The unfolding obsession with Bostock somewhat modernizes him, but more devastatingly, it forces him to leave his tomb. He confronts his sexual attraction to men by recalling how he’d never engaged in even the slightest fumbling during his “undersexed” school years. He’d thought of himself as boringly heterosexual, though one wonders whether he ever achieved any degree of passion for his wife. He’s a man who cannot masturbate to completion, and the impact of all this pent-up inability to self-examine is the finale of the book in which the narrator travels to America and engineers a confrontation between himself and the subject of his obsession.
Throughout, Adair shows the depth of his narrator’s self-delusion in a really compelling way. The narrator is a British writer of a certain age—it would be unbelievable to not show him as introspective. But his introspection never solves anything. It’s very effective writing of a deeply troubled, intelligent man, and it’s very sad.
[I]magine the hubbub I would cause were I to drop in on my Cambridge acquaintances and recite to them everything I know of an obscure American actor of whom they would never have heard and to whose one feature of interest they would be totally insensitive. Only I, I exulted, only I and that legion of fans who do not count, have recognised this rare flowering among weeds…
I’m not sure if I want to read any more from Adair soon—this was very anxiety-provoking by the end—but I’m glad to have read this one. I recommend it to fans of character studies.
