Lovesick

Edward Kasper

I have a habit of losing things.  Not physical things like keys, glasses, plane tickets, children -- my record with those is spotless.  Rather it tends to be intangible things like names of movies or actors, melodies and lyrics of songs, titles of books.  I've alluded to this before so pick your jaw up off the floor.  What concerns me today is a book, in particular a work of fiction.

I used to dream of becoming a novelist, but it was easier to dream than to do anything about it.  It was my love of fiction as a child that inspired the ambition.  Reading Cat's Cradle and Brave New World as a pre-teen kindled the fire, and it remained fueled with the likes of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, Ethan Frome, The Postman Always Rings Twice among the most memorable. As an adult, the love turned to obliged admiration for the craft as the experience of a brain inflamed by the vision of a novel became a rarer and rarer thing. Sometime in my thirties, I discovered I'd largely had my fill of fiction.  I don't think it's insignificant that it coincided with the rise of the writing workshop in the 1980s.

Given how rarely I pick up a novel these days, it's a miracle that I've managed to find a small handful of them that still do the trick for me.  3 of them stand out: Canapé-Vert by the Brothers Marcelin of Haiti from 1944, the Hungarian author Antal Szerb's 1937 novel, Journey by Moonlight which I read in a new translation by Len Rix a few years ago, and the morally problematic but aesthetically unimpeachable Submission by Michel Houellebecq (go ahead and sue me, just please don't cancel me) from 2015.  Does it mean something that none of these were originally written in English?  

I came across the first of those, Canapé-Vert, years ago in the course of a reading binge about Haiti and thought it looked interesting. It changed me.  It magically tells the story of how the tragic events that befall the inhabitants of a small Caribbean peasant village are tied up in the spiritual world.  It was perfectly conceived, an epic told in the musical tones of a folktale. Why was it not better known? For several years I could readily recall it when the subject of hidden treasures came up in conversation, but trying to remember it out of the blue one day about a decade ago, I drew a complete blank. The internet was not brand new but the sensation of its power to answer what previously could only be wondered about was still a novelty-- yet it took several long and frustrating sessions months apart for me to string together the right combination of details I could remember in order to pull the name out of the bowels of the web.  At least I succeeded.

But what if the missing book is one I've never read, but only once heard mentioned?

Years ago, I read somewhere about what sounded like the most amazing novel I could ever hope to read. The writer recalling it certainly portrayed it that way.  As I recall the account, the recommendation came with a warning-- the book was long out of print, and would be difficult to find.  Its subject matter was ahead of its time, dooming it to obscurity.  Nevertheless, the perfection of its execution was such that anyone who lucked into a copy of it would never dream of parting with it, so finding it on the shelves of a used book store would be next to impossible. What I remember is that it was published in the 1940's, shortly after the war, that it was set in New York, and that it was written with understated punch by a woman, a writer with the panache of Dorothy Parker, say (but not Dorothy Parker).  I was already "over" fiction -- perhaps that's why I didn't work harder to retain the name.

The details are somewhat sketchy and to complicate things, it's not impossible that I may have invented a few of them, but in a nutshell they go something like this.  The protagonist is to my memory a journalist who finds her relationship to the doctor she's engaged to to be cooling.  She learns to her alarm of a mysterious disease her fiance has been dealing with among some of his patients, which appears to be spread through casual human contact and may possibly be at the beginning of an epidemic stage.  It appears to affect the brain, causing the afflicted to behave in unusual ways, a bit out of control.  Intrigued by what she thinks could be a scoop, she brings the news to her editor at the paper and is assigned to work the story with her long-time partner with whom she's had a jokey strictly platonic working relationship. In after-work rounds at the neighborhood bar, as she dreams of a way out of her impending marriage to her fiance, she finds herself beginning to fall for her colleague.  

At first the world seems to have shrunk to the size of just the two of them, as crush rapidly progresses from flirtation to full blown lust, but in time it doesn't escape the two journalists' notice that the whole newsroom seems to be just a bit off.  Could the whole place have actually become a bit more fraught with the same passionate energy, could it too be more alive?  In fact, it becomes clear to the protagonist and her colleague that the two of them along with the entire office have been afflicted with the disease they have been pursuing as reporters, the primary symptom of which is the unleashing of a zest for the pleasures of the flesh.  Pretty soon all of New York  is awash in a stew of  crazy abandon engendered by the rampant spread of the disease.  A cab ride is a thrilling adventure. A trip to the deli is no longer just a commercial transaction but an occasion for indulgence in the most sensuous pleasures.  The disease knows no social bounds, afflicting male and female, old and young, rich and poor, black and white alike.  When the pair becomes lost en route to a Harlem hospital ward brimming with cases, their encounters along the way turn the accident into a joyous excursion. The carriers of the disease regardless of the circumstances they had been in before contracting it bond in new and unexpected ways in a mutual euphoria of symptoms.

Who will win?  The happily diseased or those frantically determined to use their medicine to bring society back to heel?

Did I dream this book?  It wouldn't be the first time, but if the memory is real, how could such a thing -- written by a woman in post World War II America -- not be known by everyone?