Unhappy together
Told in brisk, unadorned prose, part of the compulsive readability of Berkeleyan Cornelia Nixon’s fourth novel, “The Use of Fame,” comes from its sly, sensuous descriptions of settings: Berkeley and the greater Bay Area; Providence, R.I.; and Miami. But the rest comes from its antic, Almodovarean breathlessness. “Fame’s” title, dropped like a duelist’s “en garde!” into the book’s first sentence — “What’s the use of all this fame if we’re not getting laid?” — alerts us: Sleeves are being rolled up.
Meet Ray, 52, a renowned poet teaching at Brown (in Providence), who’s long been married to Abby, 60, an obscure-but-gifted poet teaching at UC Berkeley. Their commuter marriage feels both richly comforting and precarious, a mutual adoration spliced with deep, bitter resentments. Ray’s fallen in love with sleek, calm Tory, a former (much younger) student. He also suffers a severe heart condition, which he tries to ignore while living in ways that would quickly kill the less stubborn. Cell phone activity becomes a fourth player in this telenovela of egos, sex and medical straits — of literary and academic cultures, vagaries of time, place and money — against various cozy, openbar backdrops.
In short? It’s dishy.
Ray, Abby and friends form a coterie inside what’s called Po Biz: people whose (highly coveted) teaching gigs underwrite aesthetic and sexual high jinks. Anyone who’s glimpsed these worlds will recognize the real-life humans on whom “Fame’s” characters are modeled, as well as their rather stunningly insulated levels of privilege and selfimmersion. Yet we’re caught up by it, swept off with it. Ray’s a romantic, self-torturing tantrum-thrower. Abby’s cossetted with her horse, her Porsche, her desk with its view out to the gorgeous bay. Why do they carry on? “[Y]es, he could be controlling and angry, then the world’s sweetest man — but that sort of worked for her.” Throughout their Punch-and-Judying they savor best food, books, music, landscapes — and we can’t look away, as the noose around the marriage tightens.