A wealthy and renowned author in his middle fifties becomes obsessed with a young American star. One afternoon, a series of seemingly unrelated and insignificant irritants contrives to destroy his cool, Olympian existence and he is forced to confront a long dormant truth about his nature.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is indeed 'Death in Venice' revisited. A late middle-aged widower, a respected author of elite fiction, makes an unprecedented visit to a cinema, goes to see the wrong film and is immediately captivated by one of the film's young American actors. Captivated and, increasingly, obsessed: secretly buying teen movie magazines and reading and re-reading the bland articles, cutting out photographs, kissing them - and more. Eventually, his obsession takes him to America and a meeting with the actor, and a pathetically awful denouement.
This is an uncomfortable book. It is written in the first person and brilliantly portrays the pedantic, solitary life of the narrator, the self-aware subterfuge by which he begins his quest for his hero and the final unravelling in which all self-awareness has disappeared.
The happy picture portrayed on the cover is a far cry from the reality of this dark book in which the path to humiliating tragedy is all too clear from the first.
This is an uncomfortable book. It is written in the first person and brilliantly portrays the pedantic, solitary life of the narrator, the self-aware subterfuge by which he begins his quest for his hero and the final unravelling in which all self-awareness has disappeared.
The happy picture portrayed on the cover is a far cry from the reality of this dark book in which the path to humiliating tragedy is all too clear from the first.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Very hard to say anything without giving a lot away. Imagine a first-person Death in Venice, updated to Long Island, and you're along the right lines. A real pleasure to read a profound, believable and really intelligent "gay" novel, which is also deeply moving.
By Mr. D. James
Format:Paperback
Gilbert Adair, Love and Death on Long Island
This fictional memoir of a love affair between a defunct ageing writer and Ronnie Bostock, a handsome young actor is an engaging study of an obsession bordering on madness. The reader soon realises that the sophisticated and highly articulate narrator has nothing in common with the rising star, a young pin-up whose image appears on sundry teen magazines as a role model. In fact Ronnie's picture on the stills outside a Hampstead cinema becomes the seed of a monstrous passion that drives the narrator to fly to Long Island to meet his love object.
This short novel is beautifully paced, as the narrator intellectualises his physical yearning for the boy: `Was I alone in tracing beneath the conventional surface a timeless and universal ideal, an almost supernatural radiance of pure heart, of innocent spirit and of sun-inflamed flesh?' The details about the youth's ripe redness of the lower lip, the way he wiped sweat from his brow and even `the inside cup of his elbow' show how far the obsession has gone, but we are as yet only a third of the way through the book; the pair have yet to meet, and, although Ronnie knows nothing of his latest fan, a meeting is inevitable.
The style Adair adopts is deliberately pedantic and meticulous. In some sentences the distance between subject and eventual object can exceed 50 words. Precision and accuracy are essential to the narrator's fidelity to his feelings. He is the archetypal dilettante, with a sublime contempt for the world around him; the fake and tawdry trappings of the entertainment industry, for instance, allow him ample opportunity for invective, as do the clichés of the press.... Read more ›
This fictional memoir of a love affair between a defunct ageing writer and Ronnie Bostock, a handsome young actor is an engaging study of an obsession bordering on madness. The reader soon realises that the sophisticated and highly articulate narrator has nothing in common with the rising star, a young pin-up whose image appears on sundry teen magazines as a role model. In fact Ronnie's picture on the stills outside a Hampstead cinema becomes the seed of a monstrous passion that drives the narrator to fly to Long Island to meet his love object.
This short novel is beautifully paced, as the narrator intellectualises his physical yearning for the boy: `Was I alone in tracing beneath the conventional surface a timeless and universal ideal, an almost supernatural radiance of pure heart, of innocent spirit and of sun-inflamed flesh?' The details about the youth's ripe redness of the lower lip, the way he wiped sweat from his brow and even `the inside cup of his elbow' show how far the obsession has gone, but we are as yet only a third of the way through the book; the pair have yet to meet, and, although Ronnie knows nothing of his latest fan, a meeting is inevitable.
The style Adair adopts is deliberately pedantic and meticulous. In some sentences the distance between subject and eventual object can exceed 50 words. Precision and accuracy are essential to the narrator's fidelity to his feelings. He is the archetypal dilettante, with a sublime contempt for the world around him; the fake and tawdry trappings of the entertainment industry, for instance, allow him ample opportunity for invective, as do the clichés of the press.... Read more ›
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