The Posthumous Affair
Fiction by James Friel
ISBN-13: 978-1936797011
Paperback: 252pp; $16.95
The “Little Man” and the “Fat Princess,” as children in the spring
of 1880, trail a red balloon—a “swollen heart”—across Washington
Square. And thus begins James Friel’s
The Posthumous Affair, a beautifully written and unique, daring love story. Even the end is a risky stand on the part of the author.
The mother of ten-year-old Daniel takes him to meet Grace Cooper
Glass in an elegant house on Washington Square, occupied not only by the
large nine-year-old girl but by her three reclusive maiden aunts. The
two children couldn’t have been more different, he small for his age and
beautifully dressed in “high hat, a topper of soft gray felt . . . his
waistcoat the blue of his extraordinary eyes.” And she is “already
woman-sized” and encased in a corset, her ginger hair pulled tight
against her scalp and her dress an orange gown with many underskirts.
According to her aunts, “she was too full bodied. Freakishly huge, she
must be trimmed and tamed.” But when Daniel’s balloon enters Grace’s
hands, for the first time she feels light, as though floating like the
balloon does, right up into the sky.
In spite of their differences, they fit into each other perfectly,
he hardly reaching her shoulder. “They will be the most important
person in each other’s lives. They will anchor one another . . .” Yet
Daniel from the start finds: “She was too heavy. . . . She was too much
for him to bear. This might always be just so.”
Rebellion is in Grace’s background in this quirky fairy tale:
Grace’s mother married a large red-haired Irishman, Grace’s father, only
to starve to death with him in a Utopia that no longer existed. On the
day he meets Grace, Daniel loses his mother, strangled by the red scarf
Grace’s aunts have given her. In time, Daniel’s formerly brutal father,
as Grace’s financial advisor, tells her of her immense wealth. This
frees her to do whatever she wants, and so she goes traveling, never to
return to America.
The novel traces Daniel’s and Grace’s brief reunions, cut short by
Daniel’s admission that he cannot love her. Because of his cruelty,
Grace wants “to be mind alone.” Corset-less, “she was a voluptuous ‘O’
. . . a globe again . . . a world, a planet. She was no man’s moon. She
was sufficient unto herself. It must always be just so.” She collects
people for their varied information, not great people but intellectuals
on the fringe, like Johannes Zorn Nils, who introduces her to Adam’s
three wives:
She was intent on knowing all Nils had to tell her. If
she could have opened his head, she would have drunk his brain like soup
and never been quite sated. The image, as it came to her, appalled and
excited her. It was the kind of thought Lilith might have had.
Venice, so different from New York, is the most successful of
Grace’s and Daniel’s reunions, yet suggestive of their differences:
They had met first as children in a dream-bright New
York, a city on the cusp of new maturity, a city intent on straight
lines, a rigid geography, mappable, knowable and cognizant of law. Here,
they were in another island city, a soft irregular city, dismissive of
straight lines and certain ways, dizzyingly circular. Here space was
trimmed but went untamed. It was jumbled and crosshatched. Here all was
languorously mortal, in love with its own dying.
Grace moves from reading to writing novels—successfully. With
Daniel also writing novels, eventually revelations about each other’s
work show the borrowing from life and insights about writing itself:
This, for each of them, is how they make use of life.
They unpick and rearrange it. From its jumble, its dense
cross-hatchings, they might take one line, and follow that. They will
pretend not to know where the line is leading, but the writer always
knows. It leads to the reader. The line must loop about the reader, and
the reader who accepts the bond becomes a happy prisoner.
The novel’s controlled structure is evident, with the above
foreshadowing the end’s risky appeal. And of the would-be lovers: “They
must part. Otherwise, there will be no more story. An acceptance now
would end the tale. A refusal continues it. This is the account, after
all, of a posthumous affair.”
The characters appear real. Yet the book approaches the
allegorical, the physical paralleling, the mental in writing, and their
approaches to love. There is a surprise at the end—the gothic dark end,
in the House of Death, which Daniel must web his way through to find out
the truth about Grace Cooper Glass.
This book, a perfect gem where everything fits, is enthralling, poignant, and brimming with meaning.
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