Book Review : The Politics of Love and Passion

Asa, as I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen (Vintage: $4.95, paperback)

At first glance, “Asa, as I Knew Him” is the story of a love affair between a married, middle-aged man and an aggressively romantic younger woman, one of those explosive relationships that burst into flame, burn hot, and then burn out. “We worked together, we loved each other,” explains Dinah, an assistant editor who imagines that she has fallen in love with the editor-in-chief of the Cambridge literary quarterly where they both work. “He didn’t leave his wife, I left my job. Living that story is living in a hurricane; that’s why it is repeated until the listening population can no longer bear to hear it.”

But these thoroughly familiar circumstances are the setting for a story that is more profound, more surprising, and ultimately more enlightening--”Asa” turns abruptly into a novel-within-a-novel, an intimate exploration of love as identity, as memory, as destiny.

Hopelessly Enchanted

Kaysen narrates the story through the voice of Dinah Sachs, who declares herself to be hopelessly enchanted with Asa Thayer, but whose self-absorption is so complete that she can explain the failure of their love affair only by concluding that Asa “has no concept of the soul. . . . In terms of spiritual development, he is at the mollusk stage.”

Dinah, a highly assimilated Jew, fancies that Asa’s soullessness is congenital: “It’s a Protestant misconception. They have no notion of symbol or duality or, most important, passion.” And Dinah sees herself as nothing less than Asa’s redeemer: “When I fell in love with Asa, I forgot he had no soul. No, not that: I believe he had a rudimentary one. . .which I would nurture into a mythological beast, the Yankee with Blood. I wanted to give him this gift, passion. I wanted to make him alive. . . . I knew I’d press against him and warm his soul into being, and I knew nobody could resist an opportunity of such hot, cosmic dimensions, not even Asa.”

When she discovers that the pleasure of her company is not enough to lure Asa out of his shell, the indomitable Dinah resolves to conjure up a soul for poor Asa by setting forth the story of Asa’s lost youth in what is essentially a novella of its own. Dinah intuits--or does she invent?--a catastrophic adolescent encounter with love and death that helps her to explain the cozy but confining world into which the middle-aged Asa has retreated. Dinah’s novella is, almost literally, the heart and soul of the book.

Suddenly, we find ourselves in Cambridge in the mid-’50s, as 16-year-old Asa is careening through Choate on his way to Harvard. (The story is set exclusively in the patrician precincts of New England, which are vividly evoked but which I found to be just a bit claustrophobic.) Asa is suffering through the hormonal and psychic upheavals of adolescence; he longs for the comradeship and esteem of his best friend, Reuben Sola--the dangerous scion of a star-crossed Jewish family with a dark secret--and, at the same time, he lusts for Jo, Reuben’s sexually provocative girlfriend. Dinah allows us to understand that these passions are not-so-ambiguously linked; we are told that when Asa squandered “most of his paycheck on a whore 15 years older. . ., whose thick waist he gripped with sad passion,” he “was looking--staring--at Jo and thinking--longing for--Reuben and company.” As we are intended to suspect from the outset, Asa’s turbulent passions will reach a climax that leads to self-revelation: “No more summer, no more myths,” Asa, grown older, will tell himself. “So what was he lacking, and what was he crying for?”

A Literary Debt

The internal novella owes a certain thematic debt to “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles, but Kaysen brings her own mystical and metaphorical overtones and a certain understated but undeniable eroticism to Asa’s coming of age. I was struck by Kaysen’s unusual perspective and her marvelous powers of observation in evoking the agonies and ecstasies of adolescent sexuality. At a Saturday night party, for instance, young Asa is troubled when he stumbles across Reuben and Jo in a passionate embrace--and then he is overwhelmed when she later bestows an impulsive kiss on him: “It was a professional kiss; her tongue was in and out of him and the whole thing was over in 10 seconds. . . . Asa put his tongue between his lips to taste her again; she tasted, naturally enough, of Reuben--beery, yeasty, slightly tart from chlorine and sweat, a taste that, translated into smell, Asa could have identified anywhere.”

“Asa” is a novel with a trick ending. As long as Dinah Sachs is telling her own story--and her “hot, cosmic” version of Asa’s story--her insistent ego, her obsessive passions and her exquisite sensibilities are just a little hard to take; I could begin to understand why Asa might retreat to the refuge of home and family: “Fay, flowers, his magazine, all those shirts stacked in the drawer.”

And the novel is so intimate, and rings so true, that I was repeatedly tempted to believe it is largely autobiographical, that Susanna Kaysen is Dinah. But when the novel turns itself inside out, when Kaysen wrenches the narrator’s role away from Dinah, I was ready to believe that Dinah is simply the creation of a gifted and potent author. “Can human beings love each other?” Kaysen muses at last in her own voice. “Must we always love an image we’ve labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?”

Unlikely Candidate

Entirely aside from its literary merit, “Asa” is noteworthy because its publisher, Vintage Books, is offering the book in the Vintage Contemporaries quality paperback series--a showcase for first novelists and other new writers. Unlike most first novels, whether published in hardcover or paperback, “Asa” will be supported by its publisher with a substantial first printing, national advertising, and one of those publicity tours that authors invariably demand but seldom receive. “Asa”--a quiet, considered work of serious fiction--is, alas, an unlikely candidate for promotion, and Vintage is to be praised for its resolve to bring the book to the attention of a wider audience of readers.

But the fact that “Asa” is Susanna Kaysen’s first novel is mostly beside the point. At 38, Susanna Kaysen is hardly one of those trendy but ultimately tiresome collegiate prodigies whose first novels are the subject of so much hype. To the contrary, Kaysen is self-evidently a poised, accomplished, civilized woman with mature sensibilities. Her prose is so stylish, so confident and so finely crafted that we recognize immediately that we are reading the work of an accomplished writer. And, as an observer of the politics of love and sexual passion, she is already a master.