I read two books by Kate Christensen in quick succession, The Epicure’s Lament and The Great Man, over the weekend. I had read about Christensen in the blogosphere and after reading the beautiful recommendation she wrote for Horse’s Mouth I decided to read her work asap. Christensen writes like someone who loves to read and so I felt I ought to love reading her. And yet I read the second book only because I wasn't sure why I hadn’t loved the first.
The Epicure’s Lament follows a middle-aged, and self-styled rogue named Hugo Whittier, heir to a shrinking blueblood fortune. Hugo has forsaken professional and social aspirations, preferring the solitude of the family estate and the freedom to cook, eat, read, and pursue local women. His brother soon joins him at the family house, fleeing his own dissolving marriage. As the book progresses, the house fills with other lost relatives including Hugo’s estranged wife, a girl who may be his daughter, and his elderly great-uncle. Increasingly unhappy with the incursion of other people and their problems, Hugo decides to end his life (unbeknownst to his clan, he already is dying of a disease that could be cured if he quit smoking). As his last act, Hugo decides to cook Christmas dinner for the family.
The book reads quickly. Hugo is a vigorously witty and charming. Sam Lipsyte in the jacket’s flap notes that Hugo is a wonderful monster and hopes that we all “simmer in the dark with such humor.” Epicure's Lament and Lipsyte’s The Ask share a tone – both are written in exact and perfect language, with glee that a reader can’t help but take shine to. But there was something about Lament that the speed and vitality of language cannot cover. The book is a product of the author’s making, a fictional universe where Hugo creates as he goes. EL Doctorow once wrote that writing fiction was like feeling in the dark. But even if you feel along as a writer, that feeling shouldn't be part of the reading process, should it? It seems to me that a fictional world is best delivered whole. It made me wonder: is it Hugo’s largesse that clogs the arteries of a perfect story, stopping its heart, or is it something about the storytelling that makes it easy to eat though unsatisfying?
Publication of The Great Man, it turns out, followed Epicure’s Lament. In Great Man, Christensen chronicles the reconciliation of several women who are linked through the life and death of a famous painter, Oscar Feldman. The major female characters are his widow, Abigail, his long-time mistress, Teddy, and his sister Maxine. The book is filled with the follies of the art world, its fixation on youth, its fickle temper. But the book is mainly about the women; their relationship with Oscar and with each other.
I read recently that Epicure’s Lament was written in a time of personal disappointments for the author. Unlike Lament, Great Man mostly narrates from a woman’s perspective. The characters in Great Man are focused outwards, on Oscar Feldman, as well as on each other. We glimpse the motivations of characters in contrast to each other. In the article I read, Christensen writes that writing from a man’s perspective (Lament) and so fixedly about a strong male character (Great Man) were tools, crutches. And she talks about having finally arrived at a place in her life where she is ready to write as a woman.
Christensen’s books made me think about how I would like my writing to affect a reader. What makes a story? Seduction/ vigor is only one element. And seduction is nothing easy to achieve; it’s vitality and the knack to make fiction irreproachably real. But the element that makes a story awesome is perhaps what Wallace Stegner coined truth. Despite the perfectly cut writing of Christensen’s work, the guts it takes to describe lust and sex in such detail, I could not shake the sense that these were stories, unable to transcend the fact of story-making. Christensen writes beautifully but perhaps those crutches, her energy channeled into creating strong male voices, makes what is true, her own voice, yield finally to fiction's conceit.
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