Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair centres on the development of an obsession that in many respects greatly resembles Death in Venice (which I only read for the first time earlier this year). There’s no doubt that the allusions to Thomas Mann’s classic text are quite deliberate.Like Death in Venice, the story concerns an aging, widowed and renowned ‘high art’ British novelist/academic with classical tastes who is somewhat out of step with the modern world. By a chance of fate, he encounters the figure of a C-Grade teen Hollywood heartthrob. Instantly enraptured by the ‘innocent’ beauty of the lad, and quickly becomes obsessed with the young actor. The concepts that have driven our narrator's life - logic and reason - are ultimately set against a concept that he has up to this point only ever really known in a philosophical sense: passion.The drama derives from the act and consequence of an individual driven to enter a world utterly foreign to him – trips to the cinema ( Hotpants College II), snipping out photographs of teenybopper magazines, the world of video rentals (Skid Marks and Tex-Mex completing the oeuvre of interest). The infatuation eventually compels a trip to the US to engender an improbable meeting. Like the trip to Venice in Mann's book, the obsession with a love that can never be fulfilled means that the trip is essentially one of destruction.This might seem a farce, but the book is nothing of the sort. Beautifully and convincingly constructed, the story constantly drives towards a conclusion that can only end appallingly for all concerned. The desire of a young mediocre American actor baffles our protagonist, but the compulsion to be entwined with a source of something inherently desirable – beauty, youth, lost time, a new world – utterly entrances him. What I love most about it is the gentleness in how it recognises that when our lives change, they do not always change for reasons that we understand or can control. Despite us knowing from the very start how this story will (must) end, the journey is worth it. Overall, it is an incredibly thoughtful, touching, and really very moving novel, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
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