“This debut, or better say rebut, is our first masterpiece this decade—and it was written in 1982 . . . Some readers will recognize the slant of the pen’s I from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) or J. M. G. Le Clezio’s The Interrogation (1963) . . . [A] ruthlessly brilliant novel . . . It is a gift—a literary phenomenon of the first order . . . Bean’s sentences approach the speed of light without any loss of iridescent precision.”
Description
An unsung masterpiece squatting in the ashes of the sixties, The Nenoquich is the diary of a seducer hammering on the walls of his own loneliness.
One day, eavesdropping on a phone call, Harold Raab, a writer with nothing to write, hears his roommate refer intriguingly to a woman Harold has never met. Curiosity leads to obsession and to an affair with the married Charlotte Cobin, all of which Harold faithfully records in the notebook that becomes his deeper obsession. As the relationship with Charlotte complicates and darkens, Harold’s poisons emerge. He’s discovered a subject he can write about, but now reveals himself as someone whose intelligence, wit, and sexual delirium mask a terror of human connection. Adrift in the ruins of 1970s Berkeley, he is—like the dark hero of a nineteenth century romance—disastrously unprepared for actual love, and even for life.
Originally published in 1982 under the title False Match, and long out of print, The Nenoquich is an unsparing, painful, and often very funny story of fading illusions. It captures a generation at sea, and a seducer out of his depth. This edition includes a new preface by the author.
Reviews
"Bean writes erotic scenes with a frankness and gusto uncommon in literary fiction today . . . A chronicle of sex and death in youth and a portrait of the baby boom generation at a turning point — between political radicalism and the path of temptation, fulfillment and disappointment that came to define it."
“Screenwriter Bean’s marvelous novel, first published in 1982 as False Match, is about a nenoquich—the ancient Mexican word for a lifelong loser, born under a bad sign. It’s 1970, and wannabe writer Harold Raab, 26, is on the skids . . . His life acquires meaning when he meets the married Charlotte Cobin . . . Tension develops not only through Harold’s heartache and confusion, but in the fact that as his life crumbles, he finally has something to write about. Rediscovered, this stands as one of the great novels of adulthood’s losing battles.”
“The recent reissue of Bean’s novel, The Nenoquich, makes one wish he had kept writing books . . . It’s mordant, dark, and funny, written with an eye for the telling detail, through which an entire personality unfurls itself before our eyes, fully formed. It is disturbing and unsettling in the way of great writing. It even has a plot . . . It’s a disturbing enough premise, somewhere at the nexus of Highsmith, Nabokov, and Sentimental Education, but the grimness of it is leavened by Harold’s charm. He’s funny and beguiling . . . The book is remarkable.”
