Dear readers,
“My sister. My daughter. … She’s my sister and my daughter!” If you’ve ever seen Roman Polanski’s sun-bleached neo-noir “Chinatown,” which turns 50 this year, you can’t forget it: a defiant, tear-stained Faye Dunaway wailing the sordid secret of her troubled-heiress character’s life while Jack Nicholson’s flinty detective Jake Gittes slaps her halfway to next Saturday.
I thought of that scene again recently after reading a much-passed-around piece in The Atlantic about the surprising prevalence of incest that has been exposed by test results from popular ancestry sites like 23AndMe. And I felt smugly justified in never getting around to swabbing myself with one of the two DNA kits, still languishing somewhere at home in a junk drawer, that I’d received as thoughtful but vaguely terrifying gifts. Better, perhaps, to never know that you are 6.7 percent Slavic highlander, and also that your great-uncle is actually your grandpa.
The two books in this week’s column are not about that sort of flowers-in-the-attic depravity (or even the highbrow provocation of literary fire-starters like Kathryn Harrison’s fevered 1997 memoir “The Kiss”). But they do cast a sometimes-discomfiting eye on blood ties: tales of romance and longing that transgress most good people’s idea of familial propriety, and sometimes cross much starker lines. Should you feel like a creep reading these on the subway? Forget it, Jake; it’s fiction.
—Leah
Six years before he won a Booker Prize for “The Line of Beauty,” Hollinghurst produced a slimmer, more glimmery snapshot of gay life in London at the turn of the millennium. Alex, a diffident Scotsman in civil service, still pines for his former live-in boyfriend Justin, an out-of-work actor who treats the whole world like an adoring stage. Justin has abruptly left him for Robin, a handsome older architect with a failed marriage, a cottage in Dorset and a 22-year-old son named Danny who shares both his father’s enviable bone structure and his sexuality.
When Alex falls for Danny — and the heedless world of pretty party boys and MDMA he introduces him to — the book’s power dynamics shift and slide. The stakes remain relatively low, insofar as nothing more than broken hearts, battered dignity and the fate of certain parcels of real estate are ever really at play. (Though AIDS certainly exists in this major metropolitan center in the late ’90s, it is rarely discussed or even alluded to.) But Hollinghurst, an aesthete of the highest order, dusts his narrative in equal parts body glitter and “Brideshead Revisited”-level repartee.
Beds are hopped and boundaries blurred, both father and son a lure to prospective paramours who may be torn between the two (or worse, enjoy the naughtiness of that proximity a little too much). Most of all, though, and despite frequent evidence to the contrary, it is a book in love with love. Of the tender, hapless Alex, Hollinghurst swoons: “He was astounded that Danny, who was a ravishing idea of his, could actually be standing in front of him, the perfect and only embodiment of himself, reconstituted in every detail, remembered and unremembered — after a moment, he had to look away.” Reader, I could not.
Read if you like: Overheard gossip, house music, long drives to the country on bank holidays.
Available from: A circa-2000 Penguin reissue on Amazon, or perhaps a guilty ex’s discard pile.
“The Photograph,” by Penelope Lively
Fiction, 2003
Kath, the lovely cipher at the center of Lively’s 13th novel, is one of those sparkly people who seems to seduce effortlessly, just by moving through the world. She is already dead when the book opens, for reasons readers will have to wait some 200 pages to learn in any detail, but her presence still lingers in the hearts and minds of those she left behind. And more specifically in the landing cupboard of her former home, where her Welsh professor husband, Glyn, finds an old brown envelope labeled “DON’T OPEN — DESTROY.”
Does Glyn obey? Ah, what a short book that would be. What he finds inside is a photograph of Kath at some group outing long ago, her hand clandestinely clasped by her sister’s husband, Nick. That sister, Elaine, is six years older and Kath’s constitutional opposite, a successful garden designer whose cool gravitas balances out Nick’s fleeting, flaky charms. Or at least it did until Glyn, with an academic’s dogged quest for empirical proof and hard evidence, goes in search of the story behind the picture, and shares his discovery far and wide.
His revelation, to no one’s surprise but Glyn’s, is a wrecking ball. Marriages teeter and collapse and old friends awkwardly collide; a coterie of admirers and bystanders come out of the woodwork to color in the deeper, more poignant shades of Kath’s seemingly blessed and frivolous life. It doesn’t take a private investigator to see where all this is headed, but Lively finds plenty of small, telling truths in her deftly sketched portraits of English bourgeoisie. “Kath had gaiety and verve,” one supporting character reflects, “but she was not especially wise, nor clever, nor well-informed…. She simply was — as a flower is, or a bird.”
Read if you like: Ian McEwan, landscape design, quaint but spicy Acorn TV shows about misbehaving British villagers.
Available from: Used-book retailers and assorted landing cupboards, obviously.
Why don’t you …
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Revisit another seminal scandalizer, Josephine Hart’s slim self-destruction-by-sleeping-with-your-son’s-girlfriend debut “Damage” — or watch the 1992 Louis Malle film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and a young, ridiculously luminous Juliette Binoche?
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Revel in the shameless moral relativity (and yes, the incidental Greek-island travelog) of the prize-winning Swedish novelist Hanna Johansson’s queer-Lolita reverie “Antiquity,” newly translated for English-speaking readers?
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Inhale a long lungful of temperate spring air before plunging into Raven Leilani’s uneasy, darkly comedic 2020 story “Breathing Exercise”?
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