The night ocean

Review by New York Times Review

the past is another country, a more repressed one, and how happy it makes us all to poke around among its juts, crevices and cracks. What happened between Clara Schumann and Brahms on that trip down the Rhine? What did Mark Twain want with all those barely adolescent girls? Into this, our gleeful modern-day parlor game, jumps the talented novelist Paul La Farge, with his new novel, "The Night Ocean," a many-voiced story about H. P. Lovecraft, his teenage acolyte Robert Barlow and the diary Lovecraft supposedly kept of their love life together. Lovecraft, to be sure, is ripe for exploration. At the time of his death from intestinal cancer, at the age of 46 in 1937, the writer had published stories only in a handful of horror magazines. His personal life was similarly provincial and straitened. He was racist, anti-Semitic, sexually uncertain, a homebody and a neurotic. What was Barlow's role in that life? Up to a point, we know. He and Lovecraft were friends. Lovecraft, then in his early 40 s, first got to know the boy, an aspiring 13-year-old writer and the publisher of a "weird fiction" fanzine, by mail. A few years later, in 1934, he went and stayed with Barlow and his family at their home in Florida. Barlow in turn came to see the reclusive writer in Providence where Lovecraft lived with an aunt. They collaborated on several stories, exchanged endless chummy letters, and soon after Lovecraft died. But what happened during these visits, only a handful in all? One might guess something fairly intense. Lovecraft, as one friend comments in "The Night Ocean," "didn't stay with anyone for two months. He was too attached to his precious old furniture, his books, his dear Providence." And Barlow somehow wound up as Lovecraft's literary executor. One story that Lovecraft helped Barlow with, also titled "The Night Ocean," is about a man vacationing at an isolated beach house, plagued by the "darkly sinister impression" that there was something in the deep, "some strange and palpitant life," calling for his attention. Surely even Lovecraft, although he decried the "popularity of ol' Doc Sigmund," must have glimpsed the allegory of sexual longing in the story. A stunted book-obsessed relationship is a good setup for La Farge. As a writer he seems to have two interests. One is metafiction. His early novel "Haussmann; Or, The Distinction" (2001) passed itself off as a personal history of the planner of modern Paris, which La Farge had merely translated from the French. The book that followed it, "The Facts of Winter" (2005), was a record of dreams collected by the made-up poet Paul Poissel, who supposedly also wrote the Haussmann history. La Farge loves intertextuality, nonexistent but real-seeming books, famous people lifted from the historical record and plausibly altered, the whole Borgesian shebang. But he also has another side, one intrigued by the dull stuff of contemporary life, by ordinary relationships, especially of the failed kind. This taste for the missed connections that make us human came out most clearly in his 2011 novel "Luminous Airplanes," in which a slacker computer programmer falls in love with a troubled young woman. Here there was no question whether the characters went to bed; the mystery was why. Metafictionist and novelist of sentiment, then, team up for "The Night Ocean." At the book's beginning, Marina Willett, a New Yorker and, in typical Lovecraft fashion, a committed rationalist (she is a psychiatrist), is faced with a mystery. Her husband, Charlie, a more impulsive type, a freelance journalist, has seemingly drowned himself in a Berkshire lake. The cause, she presumes, was despair, brought on by having been the victim of a hoax. Working on a book about Lovecraft, he had come upon a volume called the "Erotonomicon," which appeared to be Lovecraft's record of his sex life. As one would expect, it isn't pretty. "In a Vile Shack in ye Warren-Streete (aptly named!)," Lovecraft supposedly writes, for example, on Feb. 24, 1925, "we tried a Lesser Summoning, but nothing Came. . . . The boy reek'd of Tobacco, a smell that pleases me not." Charlie quickly discovers that the book has already been exposed as a fraud, the true author its supposed editor, a man named L. C. Spinks. But Charlie doubts that Spinks, a Canadian appliance repairman, was really responsible. "It's the riddle of the Spinks," he jokes to Marina. Digging deeper, he finds a more satisfying answer: The author of the "Erotonomicon" is none other than the adult Barlow himself, motivated by anger at the Lovecraft acolytes who spurned him. This goes against what is publicly known. Barlow never claimed authorship. He committed suicide in 1951 in Mexico City, where he was teaching, fearing exposure as homosexual. Barlow is dead, then - a fact that seems incontrovertible, one of the few in this bubbling stew of a book. (La Farge even includes a photocopy of his death certificate.) But Charlie soon picks up a trail that suggests Barlow faked his death and is living quietly in the town of Parry Sound, Ontario, to which Charlie now goes for the scoop. He gets the true story of what happened between Barlow and Lovecraft. Charlie's persistence pays off when HarperCollins buys "The Book of the Law of Love," as Charlie titles his inquiry, for $200,000. On publication he becomes a celebrity, the toast of literary Manhattan. Marina alone suspects that the "story was too good to be true," but spouse-loyal, she holds her tongue. Then things begin to unravel. Barlow is not who he seems; the author is not whom Charlie believes; disgrace and suicide follow. It is left to the wife to rereport her husband's story, to make the same trip to Parry Sound and find out what is really going on. Partly, one intuits, Marina makes this effort because she too wants Lovecraft, creator of the weird, to have been less weird himself. "If he really did love Bobby, at least that would mean he was human," one character comments. But she also goes on this journey to retrieve the man she loves. "This is not the story of our marriage," she insists, though of course it is. And where there is love there is hope. No one, she points out, ever found her husband's body. What if he too is faking his death? "There was a word for it in fandom's argot," she remembers Charlie telling her when talking about Barlow: " pseuicide ." There won't necessarily be a clear resolution to this mystery - or to any of the other mysteries the novel poses - but then, resolution is precisely what this story seeks to frustrate. And the book's five narrators (Marina, Charlie, Barlow, Spinks and Lovecraft) combine to tell a beauty of a tale. "The Night Ocean" is a book full of pleasures. Though La Farge's prose is as postmodernly fervid as Lovecraft's is nostalgically formal, echoes of the horror writer's work abound. The name Marina Willett recalls Marinus Willett, the investigator of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" - itself a parable, as Marina notes, "on the perils of research." Likewise, the novel "The Night Ocean" contains in its particulars a number of allusions to the Lovecraft story that gives it its name. La Farge is a capable mimic, capturing everything from the talk of prewar science fiction fanboys to the language of modern internet trolls. And he (I'm assuming it's La Farge) has even put up a website that purports to sell the reissued "Erotonomicon." Dashing, playful and cleverly imagined, "The Night Ocean" emerges as an inexhaustible shaggy monster, part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative and the seduction of a good story. La Farge loves intertextuality, nonexistent books, the whole Borgesian shebang. D. T. MAX is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* H. P. Lovecraft has become a lightning rod of late for writers Victor LaValle, Matt Ruff, Kij Johnson, Ruthanna Emrys, and Silvia Garcia-Moreno to name a few who turn his fiction head over tentacles, using their own weird fiction to re-examine Lovecraft's racism, sexism, and homophobia. La Farge furthers this trend to great effect, blending weird fiction, literary fiction, mystery, and memoir into a strange cocktail. The Night Ocean was originally a short story, co-written by Lovecraft and young Robert Barlow in 1930s Florida. La Farge creates a fictional web from Barlow's life and other events like William S. Burroughs' time in Mexico, the McCarthy era, and the fan wars of early science-fiction writers. When Charlie Willett, fascinated by Lovecraft's legacy, digs up Barlow's diary of Lovecraft's Florida visit, which alleges a homosexual relationship, he becomes caught in the web. Every string he pulls creates further entanglements. Is the diary real? Did Barlow commit suicide in Mexico? One more dimension is added as Willett's psychotherapist wife, Marina, struggles to find out what happened to Charlie after he became lost in his obsession. La Farge's tale should enthrall readers who want to explore the human cost of false facts and personal deceptions, the nebulous borders of memoir and fiction, or the self-inflicted wounds of prejudice. It's a sudden fall down a bibliophile's rabbit hole of somewhat forgotten writers and a reminder that the real world can be just as weird as the Cthulhu mythos. Knowledge of Lovecraft or the book's other references will enhance a reader's experience but aren't required.--Hollands, Neil Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Reviewed by Peter Cannon. Was H.P. Lovecraft, the great American horror writer, gay? That's the question at the start of this ingenious, provocative work of alternative history from La Farge (Luminous Airplanes). All the evidence, including Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence and the firsthand accounts of those who knew him (notably the woman to whom he was briefly married), indicates that he was not. In his letters, he called homosexuality a perversion, but then he dismissed human sexuality in general as a lower form of animal activity. But what if this was all a pose? Lovecraft, who lived most of his life in Providence, R.I., did spend the summer of 1934 visiting a teenage fan, Robert Barlow, at the Barlow family home in central Florida. Barlow, who would later become a professor of Mexican ethnography, committed suicide in Mexico City in 1951 to escape blackmailers who were threatening to expose him as a homosexual. In the present day of this novel, New York freelance writer Charlie Willett, an avid Lovecraft fan, manages to locate a copy of the Erotonomicon (a play on Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon), which purports to be the erotic diary Lovecraft kept during his time in Florida. Coded prose using names from Lovecraft's invented mythology records his sexual exploits ("did Yogge-Sothothe in my [hotel] room"). While retracing Lovecraft's steps in Florida, Charlie learns that Barlow may have faked his death and could still be alive. In the end, Charlie secures a substantial advance for a book about Lovecraft as a closet homosexual. Unfortunately for Charlie, he gets some critical facts wrong. He becomes a pariah and later disappears from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires, which is where the book's action begins. Lovecraft's novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward likewise opens with the disappearance of a major character from a psychiatric hospital, a connection made explicit by La Farge naming the first five section titles after those in Ward ("A Result and a Prologue," etc.). The whole novel is framed as the account of the efforts of Charlie's devoted therapist wife to find her husband. Like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," the novel consists of several sub-narratives, ranging widely in time and place. But instead of a revelation about humanity's diminished place in an impersonal universe, La Farge delivers insights into the human need to believe in stories and the nature of literary fame, while consistently upsetting readers' expectations. Other notable recent Lovecraft-related fiction includes Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom, a redo of Lovecraft's racist tale "The Horror at Red Hook," and Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, in which a black family contends with racism and supernatural forces in 1950s America. La Farge also touches on racial themes (Charlie's father is black, his mother white), but he outdoes his predecessors with this crafty mix of love, sex, and lies. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Physiotherapist Marina Willett's husband, Charlie, becomes obsessed with the relationship between horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and fan Robert Barlow and what happened to Barlow following Lovecraft's death in 1937. Charlie supposedly found Barlow living under another name in a rural Canadian town and published his story. However, this man is an impostor. In the harsh aftermath of the unfolding scandal surrounding the book, Charlie slowly descends into madness and disappears. As Marina investigates, she's plunged into the cultish fandom of Lovecraft followers, the anticommunist movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, and betrayal by the same man who tricked poor Charlie. Reader Elisabeth Rodgers does an excellent job bringing the characters to life. VERDICT Listeners who enjoyed W. Scott Poole's recent Lovecraft biography In the Mountains of Madness will find this audiobook of interest. ["This is ultimately about stories-how we shape them and their power to shape us in return": LJ 2/1/17 review of the Penguin hc.]--Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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1. My husband, Charlie Willett, disappeared from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on January 7, 2012. I say disappeared because I don't believe he's dead, although that would be the reasonable conclusion. Charlie's army jacket, jeans, shoes, socks, and underwear (though, strangely, not his shirt) were all found at the edge of Agawam Lake the day after he left the hospital. The police say Charlie's footprints led to the edge of the lake, and nobody's footprints led away. Even if Charlie could somehow have left the lake without leaving tracks, they say, it's hard to see how he would have survived long enough to reach shelter. According to the National Weather Service, the overnight low temperature in Stockbridge was 15 degrees, and Charlie didn't have an extra set of clothes: the girl who gave him a ride swears he wasn't carrying anything. What's more, no one denies that Charlie was suicidal. The last time I saw him, in Brooklyn, he told me he'd taken a handful of Ambien, just to see what would happen. What happened was, he slept for twelve hours, had a dizzy spell in the shower, and sprained his ankle. "My life is becoming a sad joke," he said, "except there's no one around to laugh at it." He looked at me entreatingly. I told him there was nothing funny about an Ambien overdose. It could kill you, if you took it with another depressant. "Thanks, Miss Merck Manual," Charlie said. "I'm still your wife," I said, "and you're scaring me. If you really want to hurt yourself, you should be in the hospital." To my surprise, Charlie asked, "Which hospital?" I thought for a moment, then I told him about the place in the Berkshires. Two days later, Charlie was on the bus to Stockbridge. He called me that evening. "I feel like I'm in high school again, Mar," he said. "The food is terrible, and everybody's on drugs. I nearly had a panic attack, trying to figure out who to sit with at dinner. Who are the cool kids in an insane asylum? The bulimics look great, but the bipolars make better conversation." "Sounds like you'll fit right in," I said, and Charlie laughed. He sounded like himself, for the first time in months. What had he sounded like before that? Like himself, but falling down a well in slow motion: each time I saw him, his voice was fainter and somehow more echo-y. That's something Charlie might have said; normally, I am more cautious with my descriptions. I have never heard anyone fall down a well. "Are you on drugs?" I asked. "I start tomorrow," Charlie said. "Wanted to call you tonight, in case there's anything you want to ask before they erase my mind." "Don't joke," I said. I thought about it. "What's your favorite nut?" I asked. "Oh, Mar," he said, "you know the answer to that one." Charlie called again two days after that and told me they had him on 2 milligrams of risperidone--which was more than I would have given him, but never mind--and it made him woozy. "But the characters, Mar," he said, "the characters!" He was taking notes in his ­journal, for an essay he planned to write about his downfall . "Take it easy," I said. "If they think your journal is antisocial, they might confiscate it." "I am," Charlie said. "I've only got enough energy to write for, like, five minutes a day. The rest of the time I watch Lost on DVD." He didn't talk about his therapy, but I didn't expect him to. We had always respected each other's privacy. "How long are they going to keep you?" I asked. Charlie said, "They're saying a couple of weeks." I said I would visit as soon as I could, probably the next weekend. Then, afraid that Charlie would draw the wrong conclusion, I clarified: "I just want to know you're all right, and that you aren't making the doctors miserable." Charlie said it was his job to make the doctors miserable. Then he said, "Just kidding. My job right now is to make a world I can live in." I wondered if he'd picked that phrase up in therapy, and what dopey therapist could have fed it to him. What Charlie needed was exactly not to make a world. He needed to figure out how to live in the one that exists. All of that took probably two seconds. "I'm happy that you're doing well," I said, and Charlie said, "Thanks." We hung up.  That was on January fifth. On the seventh, Charlie forced the lock on his door with a bit of plastic, climbed a cyclone fence, and hitched a ride with a Simon's Rock student named Jessica Ng. He told her he was meeting friends at Monument Mountain, for an Orthodox Christmas celebration, and she, the fool, dropped him on the shoulder of Route 7. He waved, cheerfully, she said, and walked into the forest. It's all in the police report. For the police, and Charlie's mother, and more or less everyone else, the last sentence of the story will be written in the summer, when Agawam Lake warms up, and Charlie's body rises to the surface. Only I do not believe he is dead. This, you'll tell me, is pure wish fulfillment. I feel guilty that I didn't save Charlie from suicide, so I've constructed a fantasy in which his suicide didn't happen. It's possible. Just because I am a psychotherapist doesn't mean that I'm immune to delusional thinking, and I do feel guilty. I lie awake wondering whether, if I'd acted differently, ­Charlie would still be here. If I hadn't pushed him away in that last conversation; if I had been more patient, more understanding; if I hadn't moved out when I learned about Lila. Or, I tell myself, because I was patient, was understanding, maybe my mistake was to keep my thoughts too much to myself. When Charlie came back from Mexico City with evidence of Robert Barlow's miraculous survival, I could have told him the evidence didn't add up. When he went to see ­Barlow--the person he thought was Barlow--I might have said what I felt, which was, that the story was too good to be true. Even though I know what Charlie would have said: "Mar, you're being mistrustful. I know it's hard for you to remember, but there are people out there who aren't crazy." And I would have sulked, because I hated when Charlie called me mistrustful. It made me feel small, and it wasn't true. My real mistake, I tell myself, when midnight comes around, and I get out of bed to drink a glass of wine and listen to the BBC, my mistake was that I believed Charlie too much. Then I remind myself that I loved Charlie because he was so unbearably easy to believe.   2. This is not the story of our marriage. Still, I want to note some things that happened early on, because they make what happened later easier to understand. Charlie and I were set up. His friend Eric was dating my friend Grace, and so, in accordance with the law that every young paired-off person in New York City has to pair off his or her friends, Grace threw a party in her Hester Street studio, and Charlie and I were invited. I didn't want to go. This was in 2004, when I was doing my residency at Weill Cornell, and I reserved my free time for sleep or reading the novels that piled up on my little glass-topped table. Also, the night of the party was very cold. But then I thought, Marina, if you don't leave the house, you're going to spend the rest of your life alone, or, worse, you're going to marry a doctor. So I put on about six layers of clothes, and, feeling like one of the old Star Wars action figures Charlie collected--I didn't know about them yet, but now, eight years later, Charlie images are what come to mind--I took a cab to the Lower East Side. As soon as I got to the party, I wished I hadn't come. Thirty of Grace's art school friends were crammed into her studio, holding drinks close to their chests and shouting at one another over a mix CD. It was like being in college again, and I felt a kind of despair, watching all those people pretend that time did not exist. But it was so cold out that I didn't go home right away, and while I was leaning against the wall, wondering if I had changed since college, Grace came up to me and shouted, "Marina! I need your help! I left my inhaler somewhere, and now I can't find it." With a familiar mild irritation--Grace was always losing things, ­always asking for help--I headed toward the bathroom. My path was blocked by a large plastic rabbit, spray-painted gold, and while I stood before it, wondering what it was doing there, a boy asked if I knew where the rabbit had come from. "Probably from a gallery in Williamsburg," I said, and the boy, who was, of course, Charlie, laughed. He told me he had seen a rabbit just like this one, once, in Memphis, and he'd discovered that it came from a chain of restaurants called the Happy Rabbit. The chain was founded by a Chinese immigrant named William Lee, and the amazing thing, Charlie said, although I didn't know his name yet, the amazing thing, he said, was that Mr. Lee actually served rabbit, because he believed that, in the future, nuclear war would make it impossible to raise beef cows or even sheep. "Like many other people," Charlie said, "he was preparing for a future that never happened." "Or at least one that hasn't happened yet," I said. Charlie grinned. It was as if he'd thrown a football into some trees, and I had not only caught it but thrown it back to him. "Actually," he said, "I'm not sure this is one of the Happy Rabbit rabbits. But it could be." He was skinny and stooped, with a scraggly goatee and hair clipped close to his skull. His skin was light brown. He wore a green army jacket over a blue paisley shirt and red pants: a motley outfit, I thought, as if he were protecting himself by playing the fool. He wasn't the man I had dreamed of meeting, but my dreams were confused, and the men I did meet were often good-looking jerks. And then it was midnight, and everyone else had gone out to a bar. We were still standing beside the rabbit. Suddenly, Charlie asked, "Is it all right if I kiss you?" I said he might as well. "What do you mean, I might as well?" he asked. "Well," I said, "no one knows when that ­nuclear war's going to show up." But this isn't the story of our marriage. It's not the story of how quickly Charlie moved in with me and stood Han Solo and Darth Vader on my bookshelf, in front of D. W. Winnicott and George Eliot. It isn't the story of how we got married at City Hall, with Charlie's mother and my brothers as witnesses, because my parents refused to come down from Connecticut to watch me marry a schvartze; or how we posed in front of a photomural of the Statue of Liberty, and Charlie remarked that the statue was exactly the wrong symbol for people who were getting married, and I punched him in the ribs. What's important is that I loved Charlie because he made life lively. When I met him, he worked as a fact-checker at the Village Voice, and in his free time, he wrote profiles of people who could have been famous, or should have been famous but weren't, because of some stubbornness in their character, or some flaw in the world. He didn't make a lot of money, but that didn't matter, because I was making enough. After my residency, I was an attending for two years at Mount Sinai, then I went into private practice, doing analytic psychotherapy, which I believe in, and which I'm good at.  What Charlie was good at was immersing himself in obscure and beautiful facts. He loved the people he wrote about in a way that I sometimes envied but would have been afraid to imitate. As a therapist, you get to care deeply about your patients, but you can't love them without sacrificing the neutrality that makes therapy work. For Charlie, there was no limit. When he was writing about an employee of the Oakland Department of Motor Vehicles who had invented a purely rational language and was, so far as anyone knew, its only speaker, he learned the language. He and the DMV employee conversed in it; I listened with amazement as Charlie clicked and clucked into his phone, scribbling notes on a steno pad balanced on his knee. But when I read his profile of the language inventor, I ­understood why he had put so much effort into the research: I could see the DMV employee standing at the breakfast bar of his bachelor's apartment (he'd invented his language, he said, as a way to make sense of things after a bad divorce), eating a Baby Ruth, and licking chocolate from his fingers. "Was that what you were talking about? Candy?" I asked. "Uh, no," Charlie said. "Actually, I intuited he was a Three Musketeers kind of guy." "You intuited ?" "Yeah," Charlie said, "sometimes, when you get deep enough into someone's head, you can kind of see things. It's like you become them, and you're seeing the world through their eyes. Of course, I asked him about it, after I wrote the first draft. Baby Ruth. I was pretty close, right?" Why was Charlie the way he was? As we got to know each other, I couldn't help coming up with some hypotheses. His parents were both professors at Columbia, his father in English, his mother in philosophy. When Charlie was ten, his father, who happened to be black, was accused of sexually harassing several of his female graduate students. He cried racism, but Charlie's mother, who happened to be white, left him anyway. Charlie's father died of a brain tumor before the charges were resolved. These events, coming one after another, sent Charlie into what I would have called a serious depression; he called it his passage through the underworld . He lost interest in doing anything, and in seeing anyone he hadn't known before his father died. The only exception to this rule was Dungeons & Dragons, which he started playing when he was twelve and played more or less nonstop until he turned seventeen. "I had the little figurines and everything," he said. "Even my nerd friends were freaked out. I had to play in the back room of a hobby shop in Midtown, with these Asian kids from Stuyvesant, and some guys in their thirties who were probably repressed sexual predators. But that was how I met Eric--he was as messed up as I was, or more so. We used to take the bus together, to D&D tournaments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and so on. We'd stay up all night, come back on the bus in the morning, and go straight to school. It was like we were on drugs, except that we didn't even drink. And we did super well in the tournaments. There was this one time, we were playing through the Tomb of Horrors, and Eric and I were the last two survivors." "So what happened?" I asked, trying not to smile. "I killed him," Charlie said. "The first-place prize was a twenty-dollar gift certificate. A man has his priorities." "I meant, why did you stop playing," I said. Charlie blushed. "I went to Princeton," he said, "and met a girl named Megan, who was into Pablo Neruda. Long story short, I turned over a new leaf and became the outstanding writer of nonfiction whom you see before you." Excerpted from The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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