Fool for love

The Book of Trouble

A Romance

Ann Marlowe

Harcourt: 280 pp., $23

*

ANN MARLOWE, who revealed herself in “How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z” as the world’s smartest dope fiend, earns an additional distinction with her second memoir, “The Book of Trouble.” She has now become the world’s most intellectual obsessive ex-girlfriend. I’m not complaining. Given the number of fairly stupid books on these topics, I say, Allah be praised.

Allah makes a rather larger appearance in “Trouble” than one might expect in the romantic revelations of a middle-aged, highly educated, single Jewish woman living in Manhattan; most such tales don’t include a glossary of Farsi and Arabic words in the back.

Marlowe’s story centers on her brief 2003 romance with a Princeton-educated Afghani engineer 10 years her junior, which she sees as an outgrowth of her fascination with Islamic culture. In what she believes is partly an attempt to connect with her own Semitism, she learns Dari (the Afghan dialect of Farsi), memorizes verses from the Koran, travels to Afghanistan and Iraq and, more problematically, falls in love with this preppy drunk in whom she sees far more than the reader can. “Amir looks like a Jew but isn’t,” she writes. He delivers the primal Semitic appeal she craves without the fussy, wimpy or quarrelsome qualities she finds in her Jewish boyfriends.

In many ways, her situation is both classic and pathetic; at times, it seems like an awful lot of tsoris for a five-night affair spread out over a few months. Before she ever sleeps with him, Amir tells her he intends to marry a 17-year-old Afghan virgin. He tells her he doesn’t speak to his own brother because he married a non-Afghani. One night in a bar, he tells her he wants to have sex with her best friend. Another time, he charmingly reveals that he “majored in Jewish girls in college.” His interest in Marlowe runs high during the period before she agrees to sex and dies instantly once she starts talking about how she would marry him so he can get his green card, if he agrees to get her pregnant.

Obvious as the Amir thing may be, there are matters of great complexity in the book. The section that deals with her visit to Afghanistan, planned before she met Amir in New York, offers a detailed and inspiring portrait of family life in that country, which Marlowe describes as “the morning of the world.”

Throughout, her intellectual intensity and unusual emotional wiring combine to generate pretty interesting positions. She is a Jew who strongly identifies with Islamic culture, a seeming feminist who thinks the chador is wrongly criticized, a generally liberal thinker who supports our intervention in Iraq. “Unlike most women,” she says, “I’ve always been fascinated by war.” Here is a woman who has never said “I love you” first to anyone and who finds the best sex is usually with strangers. After one of her wonderful nights with Amir -- perhaps the one they made love 12 times -- she says, “After a quarter century of dating, I’m tired of pretending that I don’t care about a man so he’ll like me more.... I want to meet someone and fall in love and live with him all the rest of my days.” One of the book’s epigraphs is an Uzbek folk saying: Aged husband to wife, “I hope I meet you in the afterlife, because fifty years together was not enough.”

Before long, these sentimental yearnings have taken our domestically naive narrator (never married, no children) halfway to the Surrendered Wife. Worrying that our current egalitarian arrangements have made it impossible for men to express tenderness, she writes: “Even before Amir entered my life, I’d started to believe that much of what modern American women feel is missing in their men -- tender courtship behavior, gallantry and emotional bravery -- flourishes when men are sure of their authority and not when they are on the defensive.” She quotes exquisite passages from Victorian love letters written by men to show that men are, or at least were, capable of feeling and expressing love as intense as can be conveyed in language. “I think of you every day, and every hour of the day, and almost every minute of the hours,” wrote a husband to his wife of 15 years in 1852.

Yes, I want that too. We all want it, at least theoretically. But we should not consider for a minute renouncing our equality because we think this is what is finally going to get us the love we want. Even if it did, it would be at the expense of the lives we deserve.

After Amir is over, Marlowe is back to one-night stands. One is a Turkish guy whose beautiful body she hopes will erase the absent one from her mind; there’s an alcoholic California photographer in Iraq who only makes her realize anew how much she prefers male protectiveness to gender-neutral buddyism.

Back home, rehashing the lost love to her friends, she cries -- “My tears are as natural a response to Amir’s absence as making love had been to his presence” -- and writes him a tear-stained letter. Then, because she is Ann Marlowe, she does a few less predictable things: She buries herself in Arabic grammar, and writes this book, which is so much more interesting than the love affair that inspired it.

In the end, it’s the banality of the love affair that yields one of the most interesting aspects of “The Book of Trouble”: You get the actual experience of seeing how a really smart person, perhaps a person such as yourself, can so utterly fool themselves about a lover.