"The Love Hunter;" by Jon Hassler; William Morrow & Co.; 311 pages, $12.95.
Do people still write novels about love and death? Are there still novels that have "fully-developed" characters with discernible motives who wrestle with moral questions -- novels with a "narrative drive," a story to tell, and even a "denouement"? Before reading The Love Hunter I would have said no. Anyone who reads The New York Review of Books religiously has been given to understand that this sort of novel is "dead." Someone should tell Jon Hassler.
In The Love Hunter, Hassler digs into some heavy-duty dilemmas of life -- right up to his elbows -- and pulls it off without being self-conscious or simplistic. He's able to pull it off because he's so sure of what he's doing, where he's going with the story. We feel this from the opening chapter. And the man not only writes well, he writes well about things that are hard to write about at all.
The love and death issues in this story concern a small group of friends -- a triangle, no less. Chris McKenzie, a college counselor, is the long-time friend of Larry and Rachel Ouinn, a history professor and his wife, an actress in the community theatre of their small college town in Minnesota. We learn the history of this friendship through Chris, who traces its genesis in an attempt to understand their present relationship. His feelings of deep admiration and love for Larry haven't changed, but they've been put to the test. Larry is now slowly and painfully dying of multiple sclerosis and Chris is now very much in love with Rachel.
This situation alone would probably fire nothing more than pages and pages of hand-wringing and soul-searching. But his love for both Larry and Rachel brings Chris to a disturbing decision. He decides to take Larry on one last duck hunting trip -- a tradition in their friendship -- and, out of love, to kill him.
The plot sounds a little sticky, I know but it works. Hassler tells us everything we need to understand the dynamics of these relationships while steadily moving us toward Chris' decisive moment in the marshes of Canada. By the time we get there, we know these people and we care what happens to them.
Hassler's characters, for the most part, are three-dimensional. Chris is the love hunter of the title -- he's divorced from his wife and estranged from his children -- a man who sees a chance to help his best friend and find happiness with the woman he loves. By carefully unfolding Chris' past to us, Hassler makes us understand that his decision is not the result of calculated callousness but of compassion.
Larry's illness has made him a pathetic creature by the time we meet him but we still get glimpses of the man who inspires so much love in Chris and Rachel. His intelligence, his wit, his forcefulness show through his bitterness and self-pity. But Hassler fails to make Rachel as credible, or as human. The woman is beautiful, honest, loving, talented, almost unflawed. Saint Rachel seems like a fantasy, devoid of the complexities Hassler weaves into the characters of Chris and Larry.
But Rachel does seem real when she speaks. Hassler's dialogues are never contrived, never rigged up for effect. They're meaningful and intense without being theatrical.
Hassler's prose is economical without being stark. He's careful not to linger too long over any one scene, so he's able to sustain the low-key suspense of the story. But The Love Hunter is not a thriller; most of the book deals with relationships, not murder scenes. And there's a melancholy tinge to the whole story -- even to the hunt:
"Off to his right the wounded mallard swam within range of the three hunters. The binoculars dropped and three gun barrels came up. Simultaneous with the swirl of shot on the water, Chris felt in his ears the concussion of three explosives, then three more as the hunters fired a second round, three more as they fired a third. The duck, absorbing the nine shots, spun and sank and came up again, dead. Its downy gray underside lay stonelike on the roiling water; one of its feet stood up like a flower on a short stalk -- Pa flat, webbed foot slowly contracting like a blossom going shut."
Don't pick up The Love Hunter expecting an initiation to the stylistic innovations of the 20th century novel. Hassler is an author of the old school -- he tells stories about average people caught up in a complex, and very human, situation. He hasn't broken any new ground here; what he has to say doesn't signal any evolution in the art form of the novel. But he's written a highly readable and appealing book. And that's saying a lot.
"The Movie Lover;" by Richard Friedel; Coward, McCann, or Geoghegan; 304 pages; $12.95.
With the publication of The Movie Lover, Richard Friedel delivers us one of the funniest novels to come along in years. Highly original and exceptionally well-written, the novel evokes a sense of l awe and amazement both at Friedel's talent and at the extraordinarily consistent manner in which he displays it throughout the book.
Friedel, a contributing editor for Christopher Street, the nation's most prestigious gay magazine, centers The Movie Lover on the life of Burton Raider, a witty and unforgettable hero. Armed with a sense of aesthetics and standards that would make even the most chi-chi of the bourgeoisie proud, Burton evolves from a highly cultured childhood that had him leafing through The Saturday Evening Post at the age of three, to realizing his dreams of becoming a movie producer and finding true love.
On one level, The Movie Lover can be read as a book about exactly what the title says. Burton Raider's whole life has been one big love affair with celluloid, from watching "Don Ameche spill acid on his privates and then discover the telephone" to impersonating Ronald Colman, and ultimately, producing a come-back movie for an almostforgotten Hollywood star of the forties named Marietta (read: Marlene Dietrich).
Along the way, Burton zips through his college years at Tufts, begins to evolve as a writer (first on his college paper, then as a screenwriter), and does an amusing stint as a reporter/writer for television's "The Morning Show."
What makes Friedel's story ultimately so appealing is the wry humor that is laced throughout. Witness a very young Burton's reaction to "Little Butch," a playmate his mother lowered into his playpen:
"When this diapered demon first appeared, I was in the midst of a nap and did not appreciate being disturbed. Observing Little Butch from a distance, I noticed that he had little going for him aside from a marked ability to fit his entire index finger into his left nostril."
Or, his first day at school:
"I gave a quick look around at the people who, by coincidence of birth, were in my class. It took thirty seconds to see that my parents had copulated at the wrong time."
On another level, The Movie Loves can be read as a touching story of a man in search of love. The fact that this search just happens to be directed toward another man gives the novel its twist although I hate to categorize this as a "gay novel." After all, when was the last time you heard of a "straight novel?"
For the book, and for us, the situations that arise because of Burton's homosexuality arise more often than not because of Burton, and not because he' gay. Being gay isn't any big deal to him. He writes, "I cannot understand why being attracted to your own sex creates such a hubbub among those not so inclined. Physically, two arms, two legs, etc. are involved; a genital difference here, a gland difference there. What's the fuss?"
What's the fuss, indeed As Burton matures, both the situations and the writing describing them become less funny, but there is, nevertheless, a zeal in Friedel's prose that gives the novel an electrical current of wit throughout -- a current that, while more obvious in the first half of the book, gives the novel its fluidity just as Burton's love for the movies acts as a catalyst for his story.
We are drawn into Burton's life and read with fascination of his homoerotic romps, all the while continually hoping that somehow this character we have come to love so much will find the lifelong joy and happiness he's always wanted with the only man he's ever loved.
In all, The Movie Lover is a novel for anyone who is longing for a book that actually lifts your spirits reading it, for those who long for a diversion from the usual fictional world of CIA spies Hollywood starlets, Southern plantations, and purple bodices. It is a book for people who can appreciate a hero who is at once hilarious, intelligent, arid most important, truly remarkable. It is a novel that comes to life with the same believability and effervescence as Burton himself, and with it, Richard Friedel has made a grand splash into the world of literature.