Of the three books in this unofficial "aging Jewish male writer stumbles into an unusual romance" trilogy, this one had the most plot complications, and therefore was the most engrossing, but also the most predictable. It's your typical "Sad old man suffers enormous failure, flees to his hometown, tries to recapture youth, or any sort of feeling for that matter, by stealing his nephew's girlfriend, fails miserably" plot. (Is that common? I don't know, it felt common to me.) I'm up and down about a lot of the elements in this book—I liked the depiction of 1960s New York City; I was a bit bored with the sad old writer routine; his prose poetic style didn't step over itself except for a couple glaringly obnoxious places; I liked how he wrote twentysomethings, though I liked the girlfriend who was far too adept with wearing teasing masques of confidence more and thought the temperamental poet boyfriend a caricature. Yet it hung together. If the other two books were probably great books held back by some unraveling thread, this was a somewhat bland one that had undeniably solid stitching. Did you know Alfred Hayes wrote "Joe Hill"? I didn't know where to put that so I thought I would put that here. Three stars.
"My Face for the World to See" by Alfred Hayes (1958)
It made me vividly remember relationships I found volatile, female gaslight-y, and far too melodramatic, which are the relationships I usually spend a great deal of energy trying to erase from memory. And while it paints a far more realistic, far more nuanced picture of two mismatched Holllywood dreamers than, say, the movie "La La Land", you're also left with the nagging sense that it didn't go far enough. That's speaking with a psychological eye. As far as the sensual eye goes, I don't know how the book does it, because it never gets explicitly sexual, maybe it's an exquisitely arranged accumulation of images, maybe it's the confused fragments of thought, a writerly way to capture the struggle to recognize and connect with another person's signals, but I thought the touch of flesh came across rather tactile-ly, especially given that most of it was achieved through indirect techniques. Bravo to that; I would have just used an outpouring of moist, evocative, three-syllable words. So overall, it just smacks of nothing all that novel. Still kinda good though. Three stars.
"In Love" by Alfred Hayes (1953)
There's this danger if you write a long prose piece using the rhythmic, structured beats of poetry, that the rhythm eventually becomes so incessant, like the steady drip of a faucet somewhere in the background, that the story actually takes a back seat. So while I kind of get it, that short, clipped, kinda calloused, clauses strung together can capture both the neurotic energy of New York City and the elevated inflammations of love, eventually all I heard was that damn dripping faucet—it was hard to absorb the story of a (somewhat standard, and therefore interesting) love affair because technique drifted into the spotlight. As if the disciplined grammar of poetry makes the story the writer's to dictate, not the reader’s to hold and inhabit. Still kinda good though. Three stars.