Book Review : Life Story Touches Too Many Bases
Albany Park by Patrice Chaplin (Atlantic Monthly Press: $8.95, paper; 192 pages)
Another City by Patrice Chaplin (Atlantic Monthly Press: $9.95, paper; 360 pages)
As a brash, precocious and penniless 15-year-old in the mid-1950s, Patrice fled her stifling English suburb for romantic, sunny Spain, winding up in the provincial city of Gerona. On Page 2 of “Albany Park,” she sees Jose Tarres for the first time. One glimpse is enough, and the author is obsessively in love for the next 30 years and 550 pages of this 2-volume autobiography.
A marriage to Sir Charles Chaplin’s son, Michael, two children and assorted emotional attachments later, the passion has just barely begun to wane. By then the once dazzlingly handsome Jose has lost some of his luster and acquired a wife and son, while Patrice has overcome alcoholism and Valium dependency to become a journalist and screenwriter, shuttling between Los Angeles, London and Spain with loyal and powerful admirers awaiting her in every port.
In the course of this narrative, Jose has developed an obsession of his own, an idea even more quixotic than his belief that he and Patrice are “soulmates” from a prior life. Jose’s mission is to restore the ancient Gerona ghetto and turn it into a cultural magnet for world Jewry and, not incidentally, into a source of income for himself. To achieve this dual dream, he gulls the good people of Gerona into sharing his fantasy, bankrupts the craftsmen who work for him and marries an heiress, only to dissipate his wife’s dowry in the bottomless pit of his delusion.
An Eccentric Project
Inevitably, Patrice Chaplin is caught up in this eccentric project. Her newspaper articles become a TV documentary, and at long last, a few philanthropists and scholars are attracted to Gerona, though not for long. Sadly but not surprisingly, Jose and his cohort bungle the crucial meeting and the shrine remains nothing more than a struggling bar-restaurant, with Jose the overworked patron, waiting in vain for the hordes of pilgrims who never materialize.
Volume 1, concentrating upon Chaplin’s adventures as a teen-age runaway surviving by her wits, looks and remarkable good luck, has a certain louche and tawdry charm. At that point, it doesn’t matter if Jose has nothing whatever to recommend him beyond glistening black hair and mesmerizing dark eyes. An infatuated 15-year-old can’t be expected to care if her lover has a sketchy education, a bleak future, a possessive mother, and no intention of ever marrying her and leaving his home. With minimal effort, we can see how the author could dream of Jose all during her dull, but apparently happy marriage to Michael Chaplin.
Another stretch of credulity, and we might even understand how an accidental encounter with Jose could drive her to abandon her husband and go to Spain in pursuit of her beloved, taking Chaplin’s two small sons with her. After this pattern has been repeated for a couple of decades, disbelief can no longer be suspended and the trips to Gerona seem increasingly perverse.
A Vain Hope
Rejected, abandoned and disappointed countless times by Jose, Chaplin continues to haunt Gerona in the vain hope that she and Jose will be able to escape together. Turkey seems like a good possibility. Unabashedly self-indulgent from the outset, the story becomes excruciatingly redundant, the monotony relieved only by the author’s periodic forays to Los Angeles, where she has a bizarre affair with a mysterious tycoon with a tragic personal history and sinister underworld connections. By that time, our sympathies have shifted to Jose and his wife, Nina, “still grubbing about, old and dirty” in the ruins of the Gerona ghetto, while Chaplin spies on them from her cool and pleasant hilltop house. But let’s have the summing-up in her own words and style:
“It was like our names had been written for all time on the blackboard and however much he rubbed at them they would not go away. Jose--Patrice. What date? 1955 or 1397? The important thing was I had to love myself.”