Fiction
After You’ve Gone, by Jeffrey Lent, $24
Ever since his breathtakingly beautiful first novel, “In the Fall,” was published in 2000, it has been clear that Jeffrey Lent is not just a formidably accomplished writer but an ambitious one, as well.
He continued to crisscross American history and plumb the human heart in “Lost Nation” (2002) and “A Peculiar Grace” (2007). Both featured the same gorgeous prose, searching intelligence and keen understanding of our tangled attachments to the past. Those qualities are again evident in Lent’s latest work, “After You’ve Gone,” perhaps the saddest story he has yet told.
In the fall of 1922, 55-year-old Henry Dorn is living in Amsterdam and learning to play the cello. Eighteen months earlier, his wife, Olivia, and son, Robert, were killed in a car crash, possibly because Robert was “drunk and doped and driving his own mother and going too fast.”
As the narrative excavates the jumbled layers of Henry’s past, the magnitude of his bereavement becomes apparent.
Few people write as well as Lent about the sexual and emotional fulfillment of great love: We see that Henry and Olivia were as happy together as two people can be over the course of 30 years, that he has come to Holland because their home in New York’s Finger Lakes region is unbearable without her, and that he has taken up the cello because his wife’s piano playing forged one of their closest bonds.
Henry’s past forms the backdrop to his affair in Amsterdam with Lydia Pearce, whom he meets on the Atlantic crossing. Lydia, the wary survivor of two brutally truncated romances, is not sure she’s ready to move beyond the companionship she and Henry enjoy in Amsterdam.
Yet she’s drawn to him by his ease with her unconventional nature. He’s receptive when she introduces him to jazz, and he’s unfazed — indeed, aroused — when she takes him to a cabaret.
The author tenderly portrays two seasoned, rueful adults tentatively embracing greater commitment in moving but slightly schematic scenes that don’t quite achieve the gravity of Lent’s many-faceted portrait of Henry’s marriage.
But no writer does everything equally well, and if Lent’s design occasionally overmasters his characters, we’re compensated by his profound insight into this bleak underlying truth: “How alone a person lives.”
That single, stark sentence points the way to a jolting denouement that will infuriate many readers, but Lent demands unflinching acceptance from his audience and offers in return only an oblique hint that the future may hold something more than despair.
As usual, this gifted writer aims to challenge, not to console.
Fiction
The Tourist, by Olen Steinhauer, $24.95
By Patrick Anderson
Washington Post Writers Group
In Olen Steinhauer’s scathing portrait of the CIA, “The Tourist,” the agency’s highly skilled assassins are called tourists.
When we first meet Milo Weaver in 2001, several years as a tourist have left him strung out on amphetamines and seriously considering suicide.
Flash forward to 2007. Weaver is retired from tourism and has a desk job. As any fan of spy novels knows, however, spooks rarely come in from the cold for long.
Sometimes Weaver glimpses the big picture, as when his boss tells him, “We can bomb and maim and torture to our heart’s content, because only the terrorists are willing to stand up to us, and their opinion doesn’t matter.”
“The Tourist” is serious entertainment that raises interesting questions. Is the boss’ last remark just the raving of a cynical novelist, or does it reflect how senior officials of our government viewed the world in 2007? We might further ask, has anyone’s thinking changed since? Indeed, does the world of espionage ever change?
The publisher reports that “The Tourist” is the first of three novels focused on the post- 9/11 world — and that George Clooney has bought its film rights. On the evidence of “The Tourist,” Steinhauer’s Milo Weaver trilogy could turn out to be something special.
