Forgetting Elena

From the New York Times Book Review: Was it Wilkie Collins who wrote the first detective novel? I'm inclined to think detective fiction may be older, the oldest vehicle for the novel, the necessary form. Who exactly is Tom Jones; what is Mr. Rochester's secret; what sort of fellow can this Osmond be? These are mysteries to be solved, and their solutions, chapter by chapter, generate novels. It is the reader who plays private investigator throughout--as in fact he does in the standard detective novel--sifting through the author's clues and relishing the evidence. As he grows more wily, his first question, "What is Ahab up to?," changes into "What is Melville up to?" He reads "The Trial" and Kafka becomes a principal suspect, his work a plot. Each new novel by Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet or Gass implicitly dares readers to match wits with the author's deception. We grow more cunning, they more devious. This nearly inscrutable mystery by Edmund White is a Chinese puzzle. The East of its setting is our own East Coast, but also, subtly, the Orient. On page after page the ancient classics of the East underlie the text. The chinoiserie of the narrator's hard, gemlike style is at all points poetically controlled. And his story is told with a trompe-l'oeil realism that evaporates--while we are looking right at it--into the thin air of a charade: an Oriental court ritual. One fine summer day a young man wakes up in a cottage full of older men and--who is he? He hasn't a clue, and neither do we. His predicament is Kafka-esque. It may be amnesia. He doesn't know his own name. He can't recall any of these people. Instead of asking questions, however, he plays detective. All he has to do is watch his companions closely, and they will inevitably supply him with clues. He does watch, ever so closely, and the clues in "Forgetting Elena" turn out to be the bitter stuff of satire. For he inhabits a catty male beach society ruled by cliques, impressed by archness, enamored of 10-year-old boy dancers, in love with put-down, thrilled by camp, vamp, and very damp wit. To deduce and induce his own identity, he participates--passively--in a contest between the two strongest characters in this puzzle, each of whom slyly struggles to possess him. The Dark Lady on this fiery island is an unnamed charmer whom the reader quickly surmises must be the forgotten Elena of the title. She seems to want something from the young man. What can it be? He has forgotten not only the woman but love, and he must labor to decipher sex. "Similarity of position would suggest that her cleft was the counterpart to my penis.... When will this end? Shall we continue to lick and massage each other all night until exhaustion puts a stop to our work?" In question is the young man's sexual identity, not only his name and personal past. The lady's rival for his loyalty and affection is Herbert, the Arbiter Elegantarium among the beach boys and their female consorts, and devotee of short poems improvised and exchanged in the Oriental manner. The man-without-name is fascinated by Herbert's casual authority and control of punctilio. "As I hung the towel beside the stove to dry, I hummed a song--the same song Herbert had hummed when he had done the dishes after lunch. I didn't know its title; I certainly hope it was as appropriate to eleven in the evening as it must have been to two-thirty in the afternoon!" In fact, he is as desperately anxious to avoid the gauche as Kafka's K. is to deny his guilt. Kafka's heroes are apt to overheat themselves as they wrestle with their mysteries. This young man is a master of reserve and a connoisseur of face-saving techniques, skilled at avoiding absurdity, careful never to humiliate himself. He is reluctant even to ask the absurd question, "Who am I?" When he does, Elena laughs. "Forgetting Elena" is a masterful piece of work, I have no doubt of that. The trouble lies in the contrivance. There is something so unfailingly petty about the narrator's apprehensions ("I had no idea whether it was good form or bad to speak to Herbert in this assemblage") and something so oppressive about his preoccupations (Bob "neglected to pull the door all the way shut behind him. Had the others seen this new impropriety, I wondered") that it is often difficult to be receptive to the book's genuine wonders. Nevertheless, all his obsessions, no matter how trivial, especially his concern with the most trifling protocol, are so many clues to the final revelation. The narrator himself turns out to be the target of an irony so profound that, by contrast, Elena and Herbert and everyone else against whom his whiplash-fine observations are directed, comes off considerably better than he does. "Forgetting Elena" satirizes itself. Its poetic brilliance is more precious and more devious than the precious deviousness it scrutinizes. Moreover, it precisely strives for that effect from the start, the effect of a "charade or hieroglyph." When it ends, my private eye tells me that the young man knew himself better before he found out who he was. That may be a virtue in a detective story as far-reaching as this one, the tale of a sleuth who strives to detect the mystery of the self. All in all, "Forgetting Elena" amounts to an astonishing first novel, obsessively fussy, and yet uncannily beautiful.