Synopsis
A writer facing mid-life alone and mourning the loss of the boundless energy he squandered as a young man taps into the vitality of a nineteen-year-old fan who almost seduces him into love until he comes to his senses
Reviews
Nichols enjoys a sizable cult reputation on the strength of his New Mexico trilogy ( The Milagro Beanfield War ; The Magic Journey ; The Nirvana Blues ) , but it is hard to imagine any but the staunchest of his supporters finding much to cheer about in his latest work. Slender both literally and metaphorically, Elegy tells the story of an unnamed novelist who, like Nichols, is 51 years old and lives in New Mexico. The protagonist suffers from heart trouble and is in the middle of his second divorce when he begins receiving fan letters from a 19-year-old college student ("the same age as his daughter") who has fallen in love with him through his writing. She comes west for a three-week writing seminar and they begin a brief, intense affair that ends when, considering the future implications of the difference in their ages, he begins to withdraw into a self-protective shell. The young woman is neither appealing nor believable, the man is a morass of self-pity, and the novel is a ponderous array of cliches. The situation reeks of mid-life male fantasizing, and its muted collapse leaves the reader unmoved. The book comes to life only when Nichols writes of mountain terrain, through which his protagonist moves with a satisfying ease.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The narrator of this short novel by Nichols (The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, etc.) is a 50-ish writer living in New Mexico, in the process of divorcing his second and much younger wife. A college junior has written him a fan letter, following it up with a spate of raunchy missives culminating in news that she's coming West to spend some time in a writers' colony near where he lives. Their affair, therefore, is preordained; but, suffering from heart disease and feelings of failure, the narrator finds himself most of the time a step behind, disappointing them both. Plus the fact that a charm-school graduate the young woman's not: ``She said, `Just think. You'll be stuck underground, riddled with worms, while I'm hot in the throes of passion fucking some young stud. Cold icy snow will cover your grave while sweat makes my breasts and belly slimy.' '' With a sideways nod to Hemingway's no less feeble Across the River and Into the Trees, the story consists of scenes of the narrator trying to revere nature (often by killing it: trout- fishing, grouse-hunting) while trying to ignore the young woman's criticisms of his sport or else her persistent habit of removing her clothes under God's skies. Self-proclaimed elegy though this means to be, the little book Nichols milks out of the contrast is depressed, unerotic, and forced. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"Not to know the tragedy of your own life, is not to know the joy of being here at all." This quotation from Walter Lowenfels introduces this short novel and cuts directly to its essence. Nichols's ( The Sterile Cuckoo , The Milagro Beanfield War ) protagonist is a 51-year-old writer with a heart problem who, in the midst of a second divorce, finds himself enraptured with a 19-year-old student who has fallen in love with him through his books. When she arrives in Taos, determined to seduce him, she revives memories of the youth he had been along with a heightened awareness of the changes time has wrought. "It was almost like watching himself at her age, galloping away from the older person he'd become." For a few brief weeks they share in an explosion of sensuality, but ultimately his older self proves unable or unwilling to take the risks necessary to secure her love. The novel is something of a paean to the beauty of northern New Mexico, which at times almost gets in the story's way. Yet Nichols is a proven author whose spare but eloquent prose deserves a place on most library shelves. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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