The art of loss
In his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem claims that, to be a writer, one must first be a lover of other writers: “Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.” The true writer, Lethem suggests, experiences the world in and through the language of previous writers.
Like Lethem, the novelist Rabih Alameddine imagines that our stockpile of previous voices and quotations might not obscure our vision of things but illuminate them. The plot of Alameddine’s previous novel, “An Unnecessary Woman,” centered on literary translation, but it more generally explored how literature might, to borrow from Marianne Moore, create “a place for the genuine” — and, perhaps, provide an escape from the barbarism of modernity.
Alameddine’s excellent, lissome new novel, “The Angel of History,” likewise concerns itself with the borders between literature and life. Its main character, Jacob, is a Yemeni American poet who has suffered many losses: the loss of his lover, Doc — and, indeed, much of San Francisco’s gay community — to AIDS in the 1980s; the loss of home, as Jacob, a “congenital immigrant,” moves from Sanaa to Cairo to Beirut to, eventually, California; the possible loss of his sanity. (As the novel opens in the present, Jacob checks himself into a Crisis Psych Clinic, hoping to escape from his memory of all that is gone.)
To master loss, Elizabeth Bishop declared, we must write it — lines that resonate with Jacob’s loss- and poetryfilled life. Jacob’s poetic vocation arrived at an early age. As a child living in a Cairo brothel, he was told that “poetry would correct whatever was wrong,” that rhyme and structure might order that which seemed chaotic.
While in school in Lebanon, his classmates “wanted to be the next Pelé or Charles Bronson,” but he “idolized Baudelaire and Rimbaud.” Later, he came to hate the “poetry of nostalgia,” trading “implausible angst” for a distanced, Hardy or Auden-like “bird’s-eye view of the world.”
By the narrative present, Jacob has lost faith in poetry itself. It doesn’t, contra Bishop, allow him to master loss. Rather, it forces him to live with it, and he wants out of the poetry and memory game altogether: “My muse needs an enema. I want a replacement, a trade-in.”
Hardly a page of “The Angel of History” goes by without an allusion or quotation, sometimes loud but often quiet, to a literary antecedent: Jacob walks down the street and he thinks of Borges; he considers his life and quotes from Milosz. While I’ve been describing the novel as a relatively straightforward narrative about poetry and loss, it also contains a fanciful (and not entirely successful) structural frame.
Alameddine intersperses Jacob’s narration with an ongoing conversation between Satan and Death — two supernatural and, in Alameddine’s telling, campy figures who debate whether Jacob should remember or forget his painful past. Even this fantastic conceit comes trailing clouds of literary glory: Why might Satan and Death chat? At least in part because Milton in “Paradise Lost” imagined Death as Satan’s child.
Lest this sound overly academic, let me say that Alameddine is able to make this intertextuality sexy. Take the first meeting of Jacob and Doc. One day in San Francisco, Doc stands on Castro Street, strategically holding Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” because he suspected that Jacob “was just the kind of boy who might be a devotee.”
Jacob stops to talk; the two exchange bawdy puns about Yeats’ “The Second Coming”; Jacob is turned on and then willingly dragged to bed. Didion as a honeypot? Yeats as a pick-up line? The whole thing is smart and funny and, because of Doc’s future loss, elegiac.
To be clear, “The Angel of History” isn’t just about literature. It’s also about the war on terror. In one chapter, Jacob, haunted by recent news from Yemen, writes a story from the perspective of a drone.
More importantly, the novel is a work of social and cultural memorialization, attempting to reconstruct what gay existence was like at the height of the AIDS crisis. Jacob describes the new, queer forms of family and community that flourished at the time only to be broken apart by disease. As Jacob puts it, “We were hothouse flowers, we bloomed and perished, wild, exuberantly colorful, attention-grabbing, out of season, out of place, out of context.”
Jacob feels out of place in contemporary San Francisco (“this drippy city that brimmed with self-congratulation”), in a world where Didion isn’t bait for cruisers but “has written memoirs for Oprah.”
Yet “The Angel of History” suggests that to be alienated — from past love and from the past itself — is to open the door to memory and creation. To dwell within Jacob’s mind and to read Alameddine’s prose is to see loss, if not mastered, then at least made into lively and living art.
Anthony Domestico’s reviews have appeared in Commonweal, the Harvard Review and the Critical Flame. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com