Love And Lust From A Distance

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 1, 2006

HELEN ELLIOTT, Helen Elliott is a Melbourne literary journalist.

Envy

By Kathryn Harrison

Fourth Estate, 301pp, $29.95

Emotional dislocation taints a cast of characters and their finely observed mechanics of intimacy and grief, writes HELEN ELLIOTT.

Is Kathryn Harrison confronting, or merely perverse? Or both? There's no doubt that in her quest to illuminate the deepest reaches of human emotion Harrison goes where more squeamish writers baulk. Her 1997 memoir The Kiss is a curiously elegant recounting of her incestuous relationship with a father she had never known. At the time, some quaintly old-fashioned critics asked if the acclaim came for the fascination/shock of the subject.

The Kiss gave Harrison an immediate profile and the New York writer has continued to make taboo topics her speciality. The Binding Chair is about a Western man erotically charged by a woman's bound foot and The Seal Wife concerns a man obsessed with a mute Aleutian woman. She has also written a biography of that difficult saint, the 28-year-old Theresa of Lisieux who was addicted to pious suffering. Harrison is an unusually hard-working writer with five non-fiction books and six novels to her credit, despite being relatively young.

Envy returns Harrison to contemporary subjects. Will is an analyst who likes working with women patients because of their emotional intelligence. These days, though, he prefers to work with men because "at least he doesn't want to jump their bones". It's a mighty problem, especially in Will's line of work, because no matter what a patient might look like, no matter who they are or what they say, Will finds himself in lust with them.

Will is married to Carole, a cool and ordered woman, but Will believes that she loves him as deeply as he loves her. Will, enjoying all the fruits of his hard work, has a pleasant upper-middle-class American existence, but he is always aware of the existential gnaw of a "God-bereft" life. The thing that makes this gnaw bearable, and that has transformed his internal verities, is fatherhood. An off-guard glimpse of his eight-year-old daughter will still cause a catch in his throat.

The opening of Envy, as Will prepares to leave for the 25th reunion of his college, frames the precision of Harrison's writing as these two polite, decent people enact intimate leavings of each other with chilling emotional remoteness. Carole kisses him goodbye, tucks her bra strap into her dress without looking, while Will sees the reflections of the neighbouring houses in her dark glasses. It's highly composed writing. And what's this conversation they have? She calls him a masochist for wanting to go to "talk about Luke", their son. They both seem becalmed.

Becalmed is, in fact, what their long marriage has become since the death of their son in a boating accident. It isn't that they don't love one another any more, but the cataclysm of death, a death that any parent knows they will never get over, has pitched them into individual grief too deep to share.

Envy is more about Will than Carole, and one of the novel's weaknesses is that Carole remains a shadowy and strangely punishing background figure. At the reunion, Will meets an old girlfriend whose daughter, Will believes, might be his child. The mother, sharp, cold and unforgiving about something Will can't quite fathom, refuses to say who the young woman's father is. Some months later a new patient appears at Will's door: 25, mysterious, erotic and dead set on seducing Will. Is she his daughter?

Harrison enjoys writing about sex, which she does with a style that is absolutely her own. It's glacial, mechanically observant and about as erotic as reading a car manual. She might have inside knowledge about men and sex, but her knowledge of women and sex seems less certain.

Harrison is an unusually competent and accomplished writer, yet this novel bored me. I laboured to finish it and it is only 300 pages. Her characters, despite all their brilliant art-iculation, their analytical dis-cussions and their interesting observations, are without life.

In Envy nothing connects, neither one character with another nor any character with the reader. The characters pronounce into frosty air, listening only to themselves.

This isn't what Harrison intended; she was after emotional transaction and it hasn't happened. You can have a dislocated shoulder, or knee - can you also have a dislocated emotional sense? Whatever it is called, Harrison exhibits it here and it turns an interesting scenario into a sterile novel.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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