Dangerous Desires. - book reviews

DANGEROUS DESIRES by Peter Wells. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 220 pages. $20.95.

I have not seen Peter Wells's first film, A Death in the Family, but his second one, Desperate Remedies, is a highly eccentric work that it is possible to imagine the English filmmaker Peter Greenaway dreaming up on assignment to adapt one of Shakespeare's dark comedies as a bodice-ripper for Calvin Klein. What plot there is--a woman named Dorothea Brooke wants to win a contract for serge to make soldiers' uniforms--has far less importance than the multiplying associations of Dorothea with drug addiction, conspiracies and unchecked sexual hunger. The film has a shrill, ominous tone and through it the storytelling is so fugitive as to be incomprehensible: mostly you remember sudden zoom shots, bared bodies and murky goings-on in a frothy version of nineteenth-century New Zealand.

Readers familiar with Wells's film career will therefore be surprised to see how classically carved and literary the stories in his first collection are. In these eight sketches of homosexual (and some heterosexual) identity Wells reveals himself to be utterly at home with words, with the defining moment and the telling frisson that only words can suggest. Stray sentences ripen suddenly into reflections on the psychological content of minor gradations of light; paragraphs bloom into ruefully stage-managed self-revelations. And while you expect a strong visual sense from a film maker it is in fact tone that most readers will remember from the stories--a ringing sadness that runs from notes of cloistered, humid regret to a buzzy, ambient impressionism. The second story, "Sweet Nothing" (a reference to a Velvet Underground song), captures exactly the feel of two strangers meeting on a sunny beach and entering into an "impossible attraction." The pair slip into a motel, lie together, fail to consummate their attraction, and never see each other again. The encounter occupies less than an hour, but it haunts the story's protagonist; years later he can still conjure his "beach boy": "his eyes, hair, skin all had the lustre of assured romance." That last expression--"assured romance"--is typical of the Joycean suggestion in some of Wells's writing. In this case, it is the way he drops words from one character's desire onto the image of another.

Like Joyce, too, Wells gives his characters the imagination to cast and recast their past in variously clear and deluded ways. In the longest, and arguably best, story, "Bum to You, Chum," another deeply observant protagonist, Nick Burns, goes home to his Aunt Tizz's funeral--a journey that draws him into an interleaved set of experiences where present and past commingle. Like all of Wells's narrator-protagonists, Nick makes some ,quietly important discoveries about himself--the central one being that his aunt was his birth mother--but numerous small observations and revelations are as nearly wonderful to read. In a Jamesian moment, Nick catches one woman staring dully at a Maori mother and her squalling son. Staring himself, Nick sees that "the air was charged with the light negativity, or restrained depression, which passes for everyday life." When he later drops into a McDonald's, the epiphany of "negativity" flares up again: "Nick first waited for his self-consciousness to subside, and gradually saw, to his side, one of those touching, vaguely sad couples, a middle-aged son sitting with his mother, eating food off their trays as if they were on a long, even an eternal, flight."

This mordant tone, resonant with a late-afternoon hum of traffic and refrigerators, faintly coats the surface of many stories. The first one, "Perrin and the Fallen Angel," in fact, engenders something of a metonym for the condition in an observation about two men: "their faces, variously wrinkled, were glaucous with moisturiser." Wells's characters don't always teeter so interestingly between blindness and insight. But in the opening story he is at a peak, compacting one character's anxiety about his physical beauty with the razing of Victorian buildings that he watches happening in Auckland. By the end of the story this concern for surfaces shifts to an analogous but more painful pair: the deforming power of AIDS and the looming presence of death. Waiting for his new lover in Auckland's splendid Alexandra Hotel, Eric's current boyfriend, Perrin, arrives with bad news: "At first, because of the light behind him, Eric couldn't tell whether it was Perrin," the narrator begins. "It was certainly Perrin's height," yet the figure's body language is very different and, for a long moment, difficult to read. The flimsiness of Wells's film work--its maddened artfulness--is nowhere better annulled than in "Perrin and the Fallen Angel," where the figure of revelation is effaced because lit, cinematically, from behind.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group