ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION : E-Mail to Female: A Romance

You know even before you finish reading it that Paul Kafka’s sprightly and intelligent romance has to be one of the year’s best first novels. “Love (Enter)” has all the features that you’d expect of hip, contemporary writing, focused as the novel is on the amorous behavior of four unconventional young people set in or near the present. Yet Paul Kafka also, most precociously, engages the reader in precisely the ways that the best traditional fiction does.

As if genetics mattered, Paul Kafka turns out to be a distant relation of his namesake Franz. And befitting such ancestry, Paul Kafka was, in 1982, the first Harvard College student to win an undergraduate thesis award for a work of fiction.

Most of “Love Enter” takes place in Paris, although the perspective upon the events that occur there is not European or Old World at all, but specifically American, and American at the end of the 1980s at that. Dan Schoenfeld is “now” a resident in obstetrics at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, but for the length of this briskly written novel, he reminisces about events that took place five years ago, during a life-altering year spent in Paris after college. His closest companions abroad were three other intelligent, privileged Americans; so even more strongly than the plugged-in version of Marcel Proust that lends color to this novel, the echoes of Ernest Hemingway’s decadent Americans in Paris resonate and give depth to Paul Kafka’s knowing revisitation of the expatriate genre.

In a nod to another tradition, “Love (Enter)” is also an epistolary novel; that is, a novel in letters--but since Dan is writing his on a computer and intends to send some or all of them electronically, we might just as well dub this an e-epistolary novel, surely one of the first.

The young intern directs his strikingly well-written missives of reminiscence to the three people who were alternately his buddies and/or his lovers that year in Paris. Beck is Dan’s Paris roommate, a moneyed, brilliant, slovenly (trom) “bone” player who’s just graduated from Yale. Bou is the tall yet elfin actress, also fresh out of Yale, with whom Dan falls in love at first sight: “I stood in front of you, Bou, and my soul ran at a fast clip up to my eyes and leapt in a shallow, long-jump arc across the air into your eyes and was gone.”

Her real name is Elizabeth Phillips but she’s called Bou for the way that, as a child, she said “boutique.” Before long Bou, like an updated Brett Ashley or Garance, radiates at the center of all couplings and triangles. Finally there’s Margot, small and dark, nominally ethnic like Dan, who shares his fascination with Bou in more ways than one, and with whom Dan will also fall in love.

Ah yes, young Americans in Paris, experimenting with romance, trying out the newest ways of breaking the oldest rules, and bending even the genders as they drink deep of Life. The feelings are fresh ones, not derivative at all. Dan’s e-mailing, for instance, is periodically interrupted by something he has to do in the delivery room. The writing of these scenes in Charity Hospital in New Orleans is so much better-informed and convincing than any merely “literary” writing on the subject that they seem to cling with newfound tenacity to the stuff of experience itself.

Lovers of Paris will not be disappointed by Paul Kafka’s fresh take on the City of Lights either. Indeed, while the Paris is right, and the med school talk so convincing, what’s truly remarkable about this first novel is how all the banter scintillates. “Spackling Dialogue” is one of the novel’s accurate if punny chapter titles, for a conversation that the two men hold during some home repair. Indeed, simultaneous performance is one of Paul Kafka’s characteristic modes: Characters say one thing while doing another. The young people’s earnest inquiries into the topic of jealousy while they’re busy playing cards fit the pattern, as does Dan’s and Bou’s pillow talk. Even the characters’ undeniable self-absorption is pardonably right for their age, as is their sexual idealism; and their surprising literacy is as plausible as it is refreshing.

Americans discovering Paris for the first time offer a rhyme, in a way, with anyone’s first experience of love. Both are discovering something old for the very first time. Paul Kafka finds these parallel paradoxes to be fertile ones, both for the avid senses of his characters and for his own narrative imagination. Oversized, brilliant Beck; bisexual Bou; possessive Margot; even sensitive, observant Dan himself are driven by fierce but always discriminating hungers for the most intense experiences of life that they can find. And all of this happens, appropriately enough, in a country where the very word for experience means experiment.

Though they act or dance, make music, get drunk, fall in and out of love at Space Age speed and are never seen anywhere near a classroom, Kafka’s characters are really professional students, at heart. They squeeze life for what it has to teach them, for what if has to make them feel, and Dan even ends up taking notes on the results of the experiments. Who still loves whom? Which attachments have survived, and which, if any, were a mistake to begin with? These four lives, it will turn out, all possess real weight, and leave traces, and unfulfilled longings, as they cross and twine around each other.

The e-mail motif, meanwhile, is so slight as to be completely transparent. We know that Dan is telling his story at a computer keyboard, and that he’s addressing his friends by name. ( Love, in fact, is the password that unlocks Dan’s nostalgic computer files, thus giving the novel its title.) He’ll print out one set of letters for Bou, and e-mail another set to Beck, who as an intern at Massachusetts General now has access to Internet.

But beyond these few framing facts, the book’s storytelling is, although vigorously imaginative, in no way distracting or annoyingly high-tech. By his deft narration as well as in his characters’ experiences, then, Paul Kafka leads us through recognizable terrain from a fresh and distinctive angle. As an e-epistolary novel that mingles hearts and smarts, the book opens onto new fictional modes a gateway that also swings back gracefully onto the past. Announcing Paul Kafka as a most promising new presence on our shelves, “Love (Enter)” delivers beautifully on its own promises as well.

ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION

LOVE (ENTER), by Paul Kafka (Houghton Mifflin)

Nominees

COME TO ME: Stories, by Amy Bloom (HarperCollins / Aaron Asher)

MOTHER ROCKET, by Rita Ciresi (University of Georgia Press)

LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, by Laura Esquivel (Doubleday)

MOURNING DOVES, by Judy Troy (Charles Scribner’s Sons)