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Memoir (Amy Bloom)

Another favorite object of mine: “Where the God of Love Hangs Out,” by Amy Bloom.

I bought this at a Borders that no longer exists--next to the Kips Bay Cinema. This wasn’t the original title. It was first meant to be called: “I Love to See You Coming, I Hate to See You Go.” That title was axed--presumably because “See You Coming” evoked dirty thoughts that did not align with the thoughts Bloom wished to evoke. (That said, the cover is dirty. It’s a peach and a cherry, and the cherry has a long stem. We’re meant to think of a penis and a vagina. Bloom is gleeful when it comes to writing about sex. She once published an essay about the loss of her own virginity. “God of Love” has an elderly woman giving her husband a hand job (and comparing the administration of blow jobs to the act of “sucking on a wet mitten”). It has a young man teaching his brother about cunnilingus--through the use of a peach. (“You’ve really gotta get your nose in there.”) It has a young woman with her boyfriend; “he licked my jeans from inseam to belt buckle, and later, at the prom, I learned that he couldn’t dance. And that was the end of that.”)

My favorite of Bloom’s characters, in this book, is Claire, the ornery late-in-life adulteress. She finds herself in an affair with her hugely fat friend, William. All hell breaks loose. She begins meeting him at motels; she presents him with a watch, and when he says he already has one, she backs over the old one with her car. “Terrible accident,” she says. “So sorry.” She presents her clandestine affair to her uncle, because she needs someone to be complicit, and he dresses her down. She uses Isabel--the woman whose husband she’s stealing--as a model of conduct. Isabel is like Martha Stewart; Claire channels Isabel’s exquisite manners whenever possible. Claire says the wrong thing, constantly; she is rude and grouchy. She does not want to be having this affair. But there’s something inexorable about the affair: Claire and William end up married, and William promptly dies, and Claire finds herself wandering around the house in her robe, talking to raccoons. It’s a very moving conclusion, because you see all that Claire has risked for love, and you sense she’d do it again. She’s not the most heroic person. But you can’t help but root for her, because she’s human and she does try to fight her own impulses, and she isn’t short on honest self-reflection. Who among us isn’t a big fool?

Bloom writes constantly about difficult desires. A woman discovers she’s in love with Eleanor Roosevelt--and that’s no picnic. And there you have a novel. Another woman wants very much to be a man--and so you get Bloom’s famous story about “the surgery.” A woman finds she is sexually attracted to her stepson. Another is shtupping her dying rabbi and neglecting her own marriage. Sometimes, these characters are more cosmopolitan than I can fully wrap my head around. One character reflects on her semi-straying husband: “A couple of blondes for him, here and there. I’m not judging.” (Really? Not judging?) One character calmly deflates Eleanor Roosevelt’s daughter during a borderline-bullying phone call. If I can’t always imagine having the chutzpah of some of these characters, I appreciate the fact that they’re passionate and messy and trying (intermittently) to do the right thing. (Bloom recently tweeted that she couldn’t stand “Phantom Thread”--and I suspect it’s because the characters may be bloodless, not recognizable as human beings. And that tweet had an impact. I’m seriously resisting the idea of paying money for “Phantom Thread.”)

If there’s a theme or moral in Bloom’s writing, I think it’s this: Try to be alive. That’s certainly the idea behind “Away.” A woman is spiritually dead, after a pogrom, and then, for love of her daughter, she fights to come alive again. Bloom has said--and I’ve often repeated--“you have the choice to be the person you wish to be every day until you die.” Enough passivity. Enough victimhood. Be a thinking, conscious person. (Bloom shares some literary DNA with Chris Rock, who, like Bloom, enjoys telling stories in which he--Rock--is very clearly the fool or the villain. Rock is rarely, if ever, a victim. I also imagine Bloom enjoying Rock’s iconoclastic thought about school assemblies: “Really? They tell every kid, you can be anything you want? I looked around that auditorium, and I counted at least sixty kids who were going to turn into Uber drivers, and I did not think they’d be happy about it.”) Bloom says: “Keep your eyes on the prize and your hand on the plow. If you want to write a book of poems, write the damn book.” She says: “It’s possible to work for yourself, and not for some idiot in an office. It takes cleverness.” She says: “Skip your classes to eat Italian food in Boston’s North End.” She simply seems to have been born with a gift for navigating the world.

Not to put Ms. Bloom on a pedestal. It’s just nice to have things--lives, habits--to aspire to.

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