Empty love

TWO loners, Jane and John, meet at a wedding. “I’m not sure there’s a name for us,” recalls Jane. “I suspect we’re born this way: our hearts screwed in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we’re deeply sentimental. Low-grade Romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music.” So starts “Which Brings Me to You,” a novel co-written by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott.

It does not take long for John and Jane to start fooling around, but John, sensing that they might have more of a future than a quickie in the coatroom, interrupts the action to suggest that they wait and write each other letters instead. The rules are simple: Write only about the past, attempt no seduction, make no judgments, and the correspondence will end when they want to meet again in person. The novel’s conceit is that by revealing past foibles, the narrators will emerge absolved and more mature.

Over 23 letters, John and Jane catalog their families, ex-lovers and failed relationships, accepting the risk that they may alienate each other. Instead, the authors alienate the reader by failing to deliver any dramatic tension and spoon-feeding the takeaways of each confession. Jane is drifting around, a little out of control, a lot bored, looking for an anchor. John, who is burdened with the unexpressed grief of his sister’s death, is not so much in search of relationships as of answers: When his girlfriends don’t provide them, he leaves them abruptly, sometimes violently and always guiltily. But Jane recognizes his true tortured self. It is a classic romantic setup; there is never any doubt that the two will end up together. Almond and Baggott don’t challenge the truth of what is in the letters or how John and Jane interpret their lives. And although there is a lot of fresh language and amusing wordplay (“We were Pez dispensers with pink candy pop ideology. Our mouths opened not because we had ideas, but because our necks had hinges”), that alone cannot sustain the reader’s interest. These characters are so lacking in compassion and insight that their banter bounces around like voices in an empty bar.

John writes about his girlfriends: a volleyball player, an East Village artist, a Republican ad agency rep, a Chelsea gallery assistant, a single mom with a jealous 6-year-old daughter. He also writes of his sister, who died in a road accident in Nicaragua. And although he acknowledges that his behavior is sometimes lousy and that he has a weakness for judging people, he continues to be pretty mingy with his affection for the people in his confessions.

His first girlfriend, whose sole problem seems to be that she was foolishly born into a lower-middle-class family, comforts him with the “solid warmth of her flanks.” Flanks? He is comparing her to a cow, and yet Jane, who likes “to play the good game of cynicism,” lets it pass without comment. In another letter, John recounts a disturbing scene of how Zoe, the jealous 6-year-old, broke up his relationship with her mother. He and the child are playing in a pool and after Zoe starts “grabbing at areas that a little kid shouldn’t be grabbing,” John pushes her away. She lands “with one of those gruesome back-flop smacks,” but John offers no sympathy for the child. “All the weeping that kid did -- it was like something out of ‘Camille.’ ” With other characters, the authors’ demographic shorthand becomes increasingly irritating. The conservative likes to shoot guns. The liberal is out of touch and earnest.

Jane’s boyfriends make for better reading, because the authors are more generous with them. Jane even seems to still like them. The most memorable is wealthy, good-hearted Elton Birch who lives in his parents’ guest house, picks up everybody’s bar tabs and speaks with an easy familiarity, as if everyone already knew him. His clownish likability, however, quickly evolves into something more serious. In one scene, Elton’s mother insists he drive his father to work. Jane climbs into the car with Elton and Birch Sr., and when they start circling the neighborhood Jane concludes that Birch Sr. does not go to work but that everyone acts out the ritual anyway, a deft reminder that families sometimes develop illogical scenarios to maintain the status quo.

Jane is less forgiving of her own family. Here she describes her mother: “She had a nervous, frustrated energy, and easily lost her patience with lids she couldn’t unscrew.” On the night that Jane loses her virginity, she sees her mother looking out the window, seeming to recede from life just as Jane is accepting its challenge. But looking back, Jane, now an adult, has little sympathy: “Her life was flimsy.” It is hard to like a character who not only thinks that but puts it in writing. Jane is not interesting enough to be that dismissive.

Worse, the letters are full of instructive summations. After Jane discovers the lovely but increasingly erratic Elton Birch in a full manic blowout being carted out of the college library by security guards, she intones to John: “I was being taught that those who are truly alive don’t make it.” The triteness of the sentiment notwithstanding, perhaps the writers might have considered letting readers figure that out for themselves. In John’s letter about young Zoe and her mother, he sidelines Zoe’s strange behavior in the pool to offer this analysis. “Hadn’t my own mother and sister been terribly close before I came along and broke up the clambake? Was I not, in a certain fashion, reawakening the trauma of my youth ... ?” The neat wrapping does not leave the reader anything to do except mourn the scope creep of therapy talk into literature.

The authors chose an ambitious experiment. Perhaps if they had broken their rules and let more real life interfere with the confessions, the story would have had a faster pace. The introductory chapter could have easily been worked into the letters, allowing readers to gradually figure out why these two are writing and how they met.

All novels are hard to write. Co-written novels, doubly so, because not only do the authors need to establish intimacy with the reader, they also must attain it with each other. Choosing romance as a subject demands even more intensity, which, despite all the talk of sex, desire and naughtiness, is curiously missing from “Which Brings Me to You.”