A stylish and witty nail-biter
A Beautiful Crime Christopher Bollen Harper
Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime invites comparison with Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series and Alan Hollinghurst’s
The Swimming Pool Library.
What makes the crime in Bollen’s stylish new novel so beautiful is that the perps’ plan works out even better than they’d hoped — at least for a while. One of Bollen’s protagonists, 25-yearold Nick Brink, works for a New York appraiser of old silver.
The other, his two-years-older boyfriend, Clay Guillory, inhabits the rundown Brooklyn house of the late Freddy van der Haar, the much older man whom Clay took care of during Freddy’s final, harrowing years of battling AIDS.
Clay has inherited both that house and half of a dilapidated palazzo in Venice.
The deceased, you see, was a scion of a patrician families.
After they meet at Freddy’s funeral, Nick and Clay become an item. During a recent sojourn in Venice, Clay was the victim of a nasty trick played by his intra-palazzo neighbour, Richard West, a rich American developer who collects and restores old Venetian art and architecture. Clay and Nick scheme to sell West fraudulent silver objects from Freddy’s estate.
Not only does West fall for this ruse; he is hot to purchase Clay’s side of the palazzo. Unbeknownst to West, however, Clay shares ownership with Freddy’s sister, who declines selling. Nick and Clay forge a new deed and get embroiled in trouble.
Bollen, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is a skilled purveyor of suspense. He knows his overcrowded Venice, the permanent population of which he puts at a mere 53,000, some of whom send “their children ... into exile so their bedrooms (can) be Airbnb’ed for prime weekend rates.” Bollen’s wit sparkles on almost every page. “Although Nick had lived in New York City for seven years,” we are told, “he’d never developed the talent for rudeness.” “The exterior (of Freddy’s house) was best described as ‘the shade of 28 Brooklyn winters,’ although Clay began to think of it as ‘rotted snail.’”
I wonder, though, if the dishonest and brutal world Nick and Clay inhabit could leave them quite as wholesome and enamoured of each other as Bollen would have us believe. I thought of Kate Croy’s haunting comment at the end of another novel that takes place in a Venetian palazzo, Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Reflecting on her and Merton Densher’s treachery toward the dying Milly Theale, Kate says, “We shall never be again as we were.”
On the other hand, Milly
Theale was a near-saint while Richard West is, as Clay points out, “a terrible person.”
Still, in lieu of going to Venice, which Bollen reminds us is being “visited to death,” you might choose a few cuticle-biting hours with A Beautiful Crime.