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Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Lev Raphael
In sneakily comic prose, Helen Schulman takes Louise, divorced and entangled with the ghost of her long lost beau, through a reverie of self-reflection
BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL IN Larchmont, New York, Louise Silverstein thought she had the perfect relationship with the rabbi�s son, Scott Feinstadt. A painter and printmaker, he�d spent time in Italy and was handsome, magnetic, and always with another girl -- until he finally gave in to Louise�s insistent, pining love for him. Then her best friend Missy stole him away, and he died in a car crash after Louise refused to speak to him on the phone before he drove off to college.
Guilt, shame and jealousy have been haunting her for years, and at 38, she�s still hung up over his death and Missy�s betrayal, wondering what has happened to her life. Then fate seems to offer her a second chance. The results, as detailed in Helen Schulman�s enthralling new novel, are comic and profound.
A book of richly imagined interiors (homes and minds), it opens with Louise sitting at the window of her new office as acting admissions coordinator at Columbia, where she�s vetting applications for the graduate arts program. She has the power to alter young people�s lives by rejecting a folder, but gazing out at the young men sunning or playing frisbee, enjoying an early spring, makes her nostalgic for the time when she, too, was on the verge of a new life.
Where did it go wrong? How did she lose Scott and end up divorcing a husband she still sees twice a week for dinner? Was the problem getting married so young that her peers viewed her move as "practically counter cultural. It had its own mysterious �lan"?
Schulman expertly leads the mildly feckless Louise through a painful journey of self-discovery that deepens each day until she admits surprising truths about her now mythic relationship with Scott and learns to let go. The catalyst is an application from a young artist with the same name as her dead boyfriend, Scott Fein-stadt. Shocked, thrilled, flooded with memory and longing, she impulsively calls the young man to set up an interview, which is completely irregular at this stage of his application. He, too, is an artist and his work reminds her of the other Scott�s; this Scott has also studied art in Italy, where he spent his bar mitzvah money.
When he and Louise meet, the physical resemblance to her lost boyfriend is intoxicating, and Louise is soon having rapturous, exhausting sex with this possible ghost, exploding the tired certainties of her life. He seems to be in love with her, but who is he? Can he really be her dead boyfriend, returned slightly older than when he died, so that she can pick up where they left off?
Divulging it all to Missy, who�s still a friend, catapults Missy to New York from the West Coast for several harsh and hilarious confrontations. The affair also forces Louise to reassess her peculiar relationship with her professor ex-husband in which love, boredom and hostility elbow for room like visitors to a blockbuster art exhibit. He�s got some amazing ghosts of his own to talk about. Throughout, Louise is shadowed by her mother, whose voice drifts through Louise�s thoughts, doing mocking stand-up comedy that directly descends from the parental nagging in "Portnoy�s Complaint."
Written with breaks but no chapters, the book has the feel of a reverie, which is perfectly appropriate given that Louise is practically sleepwalking through her life (though she has a tripwire fashion sense and spends almost all her money on clothes "that might make her look like she was invited to great parties"). The dreamlike effect is heightened by the longish sentences and the prose that is so rhythmic, poetic and sneakily comic that I found myself reading passages aloud. Like this part of a scene where she first discovers her astronomy professor at Cornell is in love with her as their eyes meet during class:
"How long had he been looking at her like that, so moist and permeable, so obviously respirating?.... out of the pure biology of his mouth -- alive, awash with saliva, bacteria, outfitted with perfect large white teeth -- came a string of poetry. A sentence Louise instantly knew was designed to save her. It was the sentence of an angel. �The calcium in your bones comes from the remains of dead stars.� At that moment, Peter�s duality, his power and his intensely open desire, both repelled and attracted her, like two refrigerator magnets jockeying in the center of her heart."
Schulman (author of "The Revisionist," published in 2000, a novel about the son of a Holocaust survivor) has a keen eye for New York�s colorful street life, which she can invest with the romance of "The Great Gatsby" when she wants to. She beautifully juggles the comedy and rage flaring up unexpectedly in any intimate relationship and she writes sex scenes as original, elegant and complex as Mary Gordon�s in "Spending" or Lisa Zeidner�s in "Layover." Poignant and luminous, this is a book to read aloud, to reread, to urge on friends.
Lev Raphael is the book critic for NPR�s The Todd Mundt Show. His latest novel is "Burning Down the House" (Walker & Co.).
(January 28, 2002)
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