READING ROOM:
our pick of the latest books and a Great Read from Chip Cheek
It’s September 1957 and the end of the season in Cape May, the slightly faded seaside resort at the tip of southern New Jersey where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic. Naïve newlyweds Henry and Effie are here on their honeymoon, both virgins embarking on their life’s journey to get to know each other. But the thrill of their marriage is already wearing off and settling into their future is falling far short of the fantasy as the couple mooch around the deserted holiday haven. They are about to leave early when they come across socialite Clara, an old school friend of Effie’s whom she loathed as a girl, and her glamorous set of pleasure seekers. Clara is hosting an endless party in her parents’ home with a changing cast of guests, and against their better natures Henry and Effie are sucked in. Leading the alcohol-fuelled romps is the trio of Clara, her older lover, Max, and aloof Alma, his bolshie half-sister.
And so the stage is set for author Chip Cheek’s intoxicating romance, laced with an anxious tension which crescendos against a background of racy eroticism. At its heart the novel is the study of a marriage; can love overcome betrayal? But it’s also about the destructive danger of desire and lust. Because of the setting and ambiguous morality of Clara and Max, there is an obvious comparison to The Great Gatsby and there are elements of the decadent jazz age, albeit several decades later.
“I love The Great Gatsby and have read it several times, so I’m sure it was an influence, in the faded glamour, in the party scenes – but it wasn’t intentional,” Chip Cheek tells The Weekly. “Henry is certainly a version of me,” he adds. “In writing him, I tried to imagine who I might have been if I’d grown up in that place and time, and how I might have acted in the situation in which Henry finds himself. As for Effie, my favourite character to write, she’s an amalgam of all the tough Southern women I grew up with – my mother, various aunts, my sister-in-law.”
Amid skinny-dipping and dancing there is a great deal of sex, which Chip confesses he found “extremely difficult” to write. “I felt an exhilarating thrill writing those scenes, and I wrote them in a fever, but then in revision I had to try to make them actually good and not embarrassing or gratuitous, and so I suffered over those passages. It made me never want to write about sex again – but I bet I’m not done with it as a subject. It’s such a fraught, immensely complicated action, and as a writer I find it endlessly interesting.”
The result is dark, turbulent and ultimately thought-provoking, with an ending that echoes around your head.