The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 28 March 2010
by Christopher Isherwood
Within the space of grief and loss, there is always the argument for life. We always say that life must go on. And on it goes, completely regardless of our individual pain. The universe doesn't much care for our grief. Loss, after all, is an integral part of the cycle of life. Grief, though, seems to be the creation of higher intelligence, of the more sophisticated sentient beings on the planet. Buck up and move on, we tell ourselves, stiff upper lip, but loss is sometimes too much for such trite solutions. Eventually, though, we integrate loss into our lives. It becomes part of our being. Its sharp edges grow dull, but the ache remains. This is something like what is experienced by George, the protagonist of this brilliant short novel.
George is a college professor in a small and new state college in Los Angeles of 1962. It is the smoggy fall after the Cuban missile crisis. George is living alone in a small house in Santa Monica (or some such locale), some months after the death of his young lover, Jim, in an accident far away. The layers of George's loss are myriad. He is a gay man living in a world less accepting of homosexuality than our own, though not entirely unsophisticated about it. The book spans one day in George's life. He awakens on the first page and goes through his morning routine, interrupted by a phone call from a needy woman friend of his, resulting in some painfully awkward details of his morning hygeine, and giving us Isherwood's raised eyebrow, presaging the sharp eye and arch humor that pervades the novel. Through George's day, his commute to the school, his time in front of his students, trying to teach them a thing or two about After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (it may help the reader if he or she has read it), a visit with a dying friend, a drunken evening with another, we receive Isherwood's acutely ironic observation of life in Los Angeles in the middle of the Cold War and in the years before the 1960s exploded (which cannot be seen yet in this book, but is felt by the contemporary reader). Throughout, George longs for the lost companionship of his dead lover. Yet he isn't entirely unhappy. There is a mechanism at work, of a certain joy he experiences in his routine and in the people around him, particularly the young students in his classes. George seems happy. He is going on with his life, as he is certain Jim would want him to do. Yet the grief has been integrated into his being. Loss never entirely goes away. This is a most engaging and brilliant novel.
Also by Isherwood: [Prater Violet]