In Love

Aware that this slim novel by the little known Alfred Hayes, retrospectively hailed as a ‘noirish masterpiece’, has a lot to live up to, I entered it slowly and reverently.It is poetically written, taking us inside the feelings of a lonely middle-aged man recounting the love he lost many years before. It is a very real account of the highs and lows, particularly the lows, of a relationship never certain of its authenticity and fraught with dark emotional gulfs of despair. ‘In Love’ is perhaps not the best of titles, it is more of a Moon story than a Venus one. And while I can see how it is now labelled ‘noir’ it is more accurately likened, as one critic on the back cover here has described it, to an Edward Hopper painting. The cold loneliness of an empty New Jersey shore hotel out-of-season at night where lovers lay silently facing away wondering why they bothered to come all this way together. When the only response the man can get from the girl he thought was the love of his life is ‘What is it you want from me?’It’s admirable, it’s a masterpiece, but you have to know what you’re getting. It’s a bleak relationship poem rather than a noir thriller. I don’t regret buying it though.

Through the course of a long Manhattan afternoon in the 1940s a man close to 40 tells a 20-something female it appears he just met, the painfully, excruciating details of a recent love affair he had with a 22-year-old divorcee and mother of one trying to make her way in the city. Things start out fine until one night his divorcee is propositioned by brazen millionaire to spend one night in bed with him for a 1000 dollars cash. Not a bad premise for a story of decline. And that's what quickly happens to our poor narrator.Written in a breathless first person narrative In Love is almost a detective story. We need to keep reading to see what happens in the end. We know the narrator has survived the breakup because he is telling us. But what role did he really play in it. Did he have a chance to set things right. Did she accept the 1000 dollars sleepover. Who is the mysterious millionaire? Does someone die?In Love is the story of a man coming apart at the seams. Our nameless narrator represents all the lonely people, all the sad men, all the hapless, the sorrowful, the pitied. But he and her and him are drawn so well, talk so sharp, argue so brilliantly, decide so quickly and fall in and out of love so aptly, one cannot call this small book nothing short of genius. I loved it. Read it, see for yourself.

Hayes' writing seems convoluted. And convoluted it is. Sentences stretch for half a page, interminable "I thought she thought" and "I assumed she wanted", punctuation where you don't expect it and no punctuation where you do. But after you read two or three pages, you come to understand that this is a style. This is more or less a stream of consciousness of the main character. It's his monologue - unedited. The way he sees things, the way he feels and the way he thinks other people do.Hayes is very economical in his use of words and manner of expression, still his prose is very precise and powerful, whether he describes emotions or behavior or landscape. This novel, or rather novella, is just some 160 pages long, but it creates on these few pages psychological portraits of 3 main characters and even in a few lines of text here and there - of some minor characters.This novel is definitely about love, but it's also about much more: about human condition in general. Sufferings of the main character - his love, his inability or lack of ability to commit himself, his lame and futile attempts to change something without really changing anything - all this is shown in so generic terms that it can be some "every-man" or "any-man" experiencing all this.Male protagonist in this novel is not very attractive; he's no knight in shining armor. In some episodes he's outright disgusting. But other inhabitants of this book are not too nice either. By showing to us his girlfriend's mood change on their way and when they come to Atlantic City hotel, Hayes gives us a hint and makes us to think of the possibility - or impossibility - of different outcomes had the male protagonist behaved differently.And female protagonist is very generic too; not very attractive either. "She had expected, being beautiful, the rewards of being beautiful; at least some of them; one wasn't beautiful for nothing in a world which insisted that the most important thing for a girl to be was beautiful." Surely her portrait is not very flattering for women. But Hayes is not in the flattering business.Some people compare this book with the film "Indecent proposal". This is so totally wrong. The book is much larger, even though sex and money are at the center of the narrative in both cases, in the book we are presented with so much more psychologically nuanced, subtle and emotionally moving picture.Hayes has wry sense of humor, or rather sarcasm; this can be seen, especially, in the second half of the book, starting with the chapter about their trip to Atlantic City and the following one, the conversation with Vivian. Sometimes Anita Loos comes to mind with her "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". But "In Love" is much more serious and bitter.Another forgotten little great book. Brilliant, very sharp introduction by Frederic Raphael. Thanks again to NYRB Classics.

Not a missed note, nor an overlooked morsel of observation into the full spectrum of the human condition when in and out of lust/love. The writing succeeds in transforming the chaos of raw emotion into a sequence of images, each wrapped in the music of the language. Transformative reading indeed. A story composed of the acknowledgement of tiny moments, each of them a little miracle, that would vanish in time if they were in lesser hands. Hayes’s writing pulls you into the very man, and allows you to see the world as he sees it, and to feel the full measure of his sorrow. He places you on his shoulder and, in a series of thoughtful passages, turns you into a voyeur, a fly in the rooms of his defeats. A painful read certainly, but one so beautiful as to transcend that pain and blaze on into full catharsis. This is a classic example of good writing in its most elevated form; the scenes come across as paintings. A visual language that stays in the mind as dreams do immidiately upon waking. You’re in good hands here. All that's required of you as the reader is to trust him completely. He delivers the goods, in spades.

Slightly disappointed -thought it so good when young