OGIC: The epicure’s howl

Late in Kate Christensen’s deceptively wicked novel The Epicure’s Lament, the Jernigan Memorial Psychiatric Hospital makes a telling appearance. But by the time the reference turns up, Christensen’s debt to David Gates’s bleaker 1991 novel has proven more cosmetic than substantive. The antihero of her novel, Hugo Whittier, may be dying a painful death, but for bitter, black misanthropy he ultimately has nothing on Gates’s physically healthy but spiritually stunted David Jernigan. On the surface Christensen’s novel is all sharpened elbows and bared cuspids, but ultimately these outward edges are covering for a reasonably soft heart.
Christensen’s novel takes the acerbic form of four of Hugo’s notebooks, kept during the last year of his illness with Buerger’s disease, a circulatory condition usually caused by heavy tobacco use. Indeed, the forty-year-old Hugo is hopelessly addicted to smoking–as well as to good food, casual sex, and as much distance as he can place between himself and the fellow humans whose less refined ways so offend his sensibilities. Heir to a very good deal of very old money, Hugo has led his life free of financial constraint but ever oppressed by the poisonous aftertaste of his widowed mother’s unnatural attachment to and queasy demands on him as a boy.
As an adult, Hugo dissembles. He lies to the people in his life, and he lies to us, the readers of his notebooks, too–for instance, he doesn’t despise those people in his life nearly as much as he’d like us to think. His disavowed compassion shows itself now and again, like the lowered hem of a slip. The moments when it does make the novel’s ultimate softening not as much of a stretch as it might have been; and their unexpectedness along the way, along with Hugo’s own abashed surprise at them, makes them genuinely moving.
(The question of what Hugo would like “us” to think, incidentally, raised another interesting question I ask myself a lot: just who do we think we are writing for when we keep a notebook, diary, or journal? Like most of us who keep these kinds of private records, Hugo through most of the novel wants and doesn’t want an audience. By the last pages, however, you feel that he has wanted one earnestly and that his being read has saved him, in more than just the most obvious way. It made me wonder about my own ambivalence between the wish for privacy and the wish for a reader, and made me see, for an instant, even the most secretive journal-keeping as a furtive plea to be read, to be understood–just maybe to be saved.)
I’m a bit behind the curve, obviously, on my Christensen reading. Her new novel, out only about a week, is the talk of the web, even garnering a glowing notice from my co-blogger (see the Top Five, to the right). As The Epicure’s Lament was compulsively readable and nearly single-handedly roused me from a summer-long reading funk, I don’t think The Great Man will be far behind on my reading list.
Up first, though: This Side of Paradise and Lost Illusions.