Bloodsong
By Jill Neimark
Random House, 275 pages, $20
An Untold Tale
By Jonathan Strong
Zoland, 226 pages, $19.95
These two arrestingly vivid new novels grapple with the complications and perils of loving and being loved to distraction. Jill Neimark’s maiden effort is an entry in the high-gloss soft-porn sweepstakes that have brought us “Damage” and “Thicker Than Water” and “Sin.” Jonathan Strong’s fourth novel, “An Untold Tale,” is a bitter New England melodrama based on a justly forgotten old poem, and is almost, but never quite, undone by its own solemnity.
“Bloodsong” begins with “I’m in love with a murderer,” and quickly picks up steam, in more ways than one. Its narrator, Lynn, is a successful journalist who specializes in science writing, a polished, confident professional woman. But her personal life is a chaos of unsatisfying relationships and uncomfortable emotional baggage, especially memories of her missing brother.
Lynn’s new lover, Kim, is a factory worker scarred by a past he won’t reveal in detail, a “broken Adonis.” She responds to his untrammeled sensuality with helpless abandon (“I feel like . . . an animal caught in another animal’s teeth and shaken gently and relentlessly.”).
Drawn into “the dark eclipse of Kim’s life,” Lynn learns of his misadventures in Puerto Rico, where, it seems, he killed a local drug lord. She becomes involved with the murdered man’s enigmatic nephew and with Katie, Kim’s neurotic and possibly deranged former lover.
As the novel’s focus widens, and Lynn’s obsession with Kim is played off against fragmentary glimpses of his former life, the narrative grows slacker and increasingly confusing. We receive bits of information from Katie, from Kim, from Lynn as she summarizes or guesses what may have happened. The mixture of full omniscience, first-person narration and second-person direct address is awkward.
There are other serious miscalculations. Lynn’s long trip to Puerto Rico, purportedly undertaken in order to learn more about Kim’s strange past, simply isn’t believable. Furthermore, as Lynn grows closer to the disturbed Katie (an unconvincing mixture of brio and bile) in the last third of the novel, Kim-who’s supposedly the center of interest, not to say fascination-virtually disappears.
Worst of all is Neimark’s language-romantic, overheated and vacuous from page one. Sonorities like “the mystery of wind” and “the dark womb of the hallway” clog what would otherwise be straightforward narrative. “For weeks, this man has poured honey into my body,” Lynn intones (now there’s a thought). “His eyes,” she pants, “are the phosphorescent blue of grottos or wolves.” When Lynn and her girlfriends natter on heatedly about men and sex, this reader felt like crawling under the nearest bed.
“An Untold Tale,” rather understated by comparison, is a story told by 70-year-old Otis Cable of Otis Pond, N.H.-of “what befell us when Sam Lara, the wanderer, finally made his way home,” 20 years earlier, and 30 years after Sam, son of one of the town’s two mill owners, had originally left Otis Pond.
Seen at these removes, and colored by Otis’ own relation to the tale he tells (he loved Sam when they were teenagers together and was betrayed by him), the novel’s narrative emerges hazily, through a series of distorting prisms. Unanswered questions resonate. Does Otis’ coolness toward the returned Sam reflect his continuing pain or only his unwillingness to become close to his tormentor again? Has Sam become what he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be for Otis? And is the mysterious, epicene young man Khaled who accompanies Sam home from years spent in the East his manservant? His lover? Both? Neither?
Strong carefully enfolds the truth-or all we’re to know of it-within a rich context of vividly rendered village life. Relations among the citizenry of Otis Pond-particularly a group of “old friends, conscious of one another all their lives” -are clearly and firmly described.
We come to know a great deal about such seemingly minor figures as postmistress Joanie Voshell (who understands Otis better than anyone) and Fred Otto, who inherited the town’s other mill and has made it a great success and whose relationship with Sam Lara quickens the story’s calculatedly slow pace and propels it toward its powerful and surprising climax.
As the story’s many references to stories (for example, those devoured by the town library’s busy borrowers) make clear, Sam is not just a romantic driven figure; he is in fact the reborn hero of Lord Byron’s gothic narrative poem “Lara” (1814), “a wild tale of a beloved’s return” featuring a Satanic (or Byronic) figure who’s pure appetitive superego.
Echoes of James Purdy and Carson McCullers are felt throughout this unusual and involving book, which, for all its murk and mannerisms, performs the difficult feat of simultaneously resolving its individual mysteries and persuading us that there remain, quite properly, unanswerable questions; that “at the very core of love . . . resides a necessary secret still point, an eyelet, an emptiness almost, a blank space not to be filled, a tale left untold.”
