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Postmarked Baltimore, by Jeff LeJeune
Book Review by J. Conrad Guest
Softback: 224 pages
Publisher: SterlingHouse Publisher; First Edition (June
30, 2008)
Cost: $14.95
ISBN-10: 1563154226
ISBN-13: 978-1563154225
On
New Year’s Eve, 1989, Father Perry Burns sits, haunted by his many regrets. Fifteen years have elapsed since he fled,
without a word, from the woman he loved, the result of a shameful indiscretion. Father Burns has just received a letter from
Noel, who managed to trace his whereabouts. Recently widowed and a mother, Noel fills in Perry on her life and also expresses
the hurt with which Perry left her. She is over him, she writes, but still loves the memory of what they shared.
A great portion of Postmarked Baltimore is told in flashback, as
Perry relives the events that led up to his decision to join the priesthood.
Author Jeff LeJeune relates Burns’s story with great sensitivity, creating in Burns a protagonist who
is mostly unlikable and tormented, while allowing the reader to catch an occasional glimpse of Burns’s goodness ― a man driven to do what is right yet fearful
of hurting Noel, a slave to his baser drives, and filled with self-loathing the result of his salacious thoughts as well as
his actions. Like many addicts, Burns is driven not so much by an evil nature but by an inability to help himself.
Neither lying to Noel nor coming clean are options to Burns, and so ultimately it is cowardice that propels
him into seeking asylum in the clergy, even as he convinces himself that it is because he can’t bring himself to hurt
Noel by confessing his infidelity.
At times Postmarked veers into dangerously close to melodrama,
but the reader forgives the occasional indulgence for more frequent moments of near brilliant prose:
Sometimes it can be more difficult to forget memories of things that never
happened than things that did; the ones that never happened are stainless, fashioned and refashioned in the mind until perfection
is attained. Those images of him and Noel together had been arranged like a restaurant table setting, neat and tidy and ready
for use and feasting. Instead, he was forced to sit at the table and avoid the setting and the food. He couldn’t eat.
He couldn’t even touch the silverware. No one told him he couldn’t leave, but he couldn’t unfold his limbs
into a walking posture either. There was no closing time. So he just sat there while the waiters waited and the managers managed
and the closers closed, bogged down and slumped over in front of the perfect dish he couldn’t eat. He couldn’t
even touch it. It wasn’t real. And that is the knife that slices men to pieces when our plans with love don’t
materialize. It’s not real. Never was. But you swear it had been at one time, just last week, just yesterday, hell,
just a minute ago. All of it was real.
In the end, Perry Burns faces down his beast of darkness, manifested as the stranger sitting across from him
in his study, taunting him throughout the text for his weakness and lack of resolve, and decides to do what he should’ve
done fifteen years ago, and the reader is left to consider that over which Perry tormented himself for so long: Noel’s
response to his confession.
Sometimes our greatest fear is fear itself.
Recommended
reading.
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An Evil Guest
Book Review by J. Conrad
Guest
Hardcover: 304
pages
Publisher: Tor
Books; 1st edition (September 16, 2008)
Cost: $25.95
ISBN-10: 0765321335
ISBN-13: 978-0765321336
I
discovered Gene Wolfe more than twenty-five years ago, when I first read Book of the
New Sun, and have been following him ever since. He has been hailed as a modern day Melville, at ease in both the novel
and short story genres. He’s disappointed me only three times: The Wizard Knight diptych and Pandora by Holly Hollander. The former just
never measured up to what I’ve come to expect from Wolfe; the latter because he fell short writing from the female perspective.
His last novel, Pirate Freedom, on the heels of The Wizard Knight, was for me a return to form, and so I looked forward to reading An Evil Guest (no, it is not my biography).
In An Evil Guest, Wolfe mixes Lovecraft’s mythos and Miskatonic University ― much of the story takes place in Lovecraft’s fictional town of Kingsport, Massachusetts ― with
iPods, the Internet and intergalactic hoppers. Set in the latter half of the twenty-first century, An Evil Guest is also flavored with a Chandleresque taste of the mid-twentieth century, although, unfortunately,
Wolfe lacks the wit and sense of comedic timing to carry it off. Our protagonist is Cassie Casey, an aspiring actress who
makes a deal with a wizard to become a star of the stage only to become engrossed in a deadly game of double-cross, eventually
finding herself on a South Sea
island menaced by the god, Cthulhu, in the nearby underwater city R’lyeh.
Wolfe is a master of blurring the lines of reality ― in this case the distinctions between past, present
and the future. The story is dense, which may leave many readers feeling excluded, even as Wolfe often resorts to dialogue
to drive the story; at times the narrative is so sparse the story reads like a stage play.
As in Pandora by Holly Hollander, Wolfe again tries his hand at
cross-gender writing, and again he falls short. Feminists of both genders will be dismayed by Cassie’s characterization.
In one exchange, Gideon Chase tells her: “One day after you get to Kolalahi you’ll be wearing a bikini that covers
three square inches. And every man who sees you will foam at the mouth.” Cassie responds by giggling and sitting down
in front of her mirror to put on makeup.
All of the male characters objectify her:
“This is one of the things I love about you. You’re not at all intellectual
— we intellectuals are, for the most part, fools — but every so often you show the most marvelous penetration.”
I can only imagine the reaction I’d get if I tried that line on a woman.
In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson tells the receptionist at
his agent’s office, when she asks him how he writes women so well, “I start with a man and remove all sense and
accountability.” A sexist commentary to be sure, which only goes to show how difficult it is to write as the opposite
sex. In An Evil Guest, Cassie’s character lacks just enough authenticity
to be a distraction to enjoyment of the whole.
In An Evil Guest little is explained, most is left to the reader
to infer ― are Bill Reis and Gideon Chase one and the same (Reis managed to pickup the ability to shape-shift while
visiting the distant planet Woldercan)? Not for the uninitiated, I wouldn’t recommend An Evil Guest as an introduction to Wolfe.
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