Category: Prose

But this love business – so far, it had been not very satisfying.  He had been involved with girls he liked; he had been involved with girls he didn’t like. In neither case had he ever really felt…whatever it was that he imagined he was supposed to feel.  He was shy, so that even though he showed determination at work, and playing hockey he positively enjoyed giving an opponent a hard check, he shrank before a girl who attracted him, and this made the search for someone who would make him feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel particularly difficult.  Moreover, he wasn’t cold-blooded, so he couldn’t pursue and abandon girls with the same relish as some of his friends, his best friend in particular, rather, he had a sympathetic streak that, in the matter of making conquests, seemed much more like a weakness than a strength.

From pages 5 to 6 of Beginner’s Greek by James Collins.   I just started reading the book a few days ago.  James Kaplan of The New York Times described the novel as:

…a deeply strange book. In fact, it is, to the best of my knowledge, a nonesuch: a 400-plus-page first novel by a 49-year-old American male, dedicated to the highly dubious proposition that such a thing as perfect romantic love is possible in these doomy, gloomy, over-psychologized, terminally ironic, post-humanist, post-postmodern times. Part comedy of manners, part chick lit in male drag, James Collins’s “Beginner’s Greek” is a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel, set, for good measure and our sociological titillation, among the WASP ruling classes, people who work at white-shoe investment firms and own villas in southwestern France and can instantly tell the difference between fine Bordeaux and plonk.

There is also apparently already a fight over the movie rights – with Anne Hathaway and Harvey Weinstein involved.

I will say now that the novel wears better than Mr. Kaplan’s wearying review of it.

There is sometimes an esoteric poetry to scientific explanations of the world. In the Scientific American, Chip Walter described the “primal effects” of a kiss:

Visceral marching orders boost pulse and blood pressure. The pupils dilate, breathing deepens and rational thought retreats, as desire suppresses both prudence and self-consciousness. For their part, the participants are probably too enthralled to care. As poet e. e. cummings once observed: “Kisses are a better fate / than wisdom.”