Love and Destruction

...Tom's need to hurl himself at life, to Uve always in the present moment, free of any constraints from his or any past —free, for that matter, of any obligation to his or anyone's future—is absolute...

...By contrast, Joanna was raised in a stable home in the Forest Hills section of Queens by fond lower-middle class Jewish parents who constantly encouraged her to think herself artistic: "Everything I did then was wonderful...

...So Joanna comes to learn what it is to be the wife not only of an artist but of a drunkard—the humiliations and the sudden rages, the battles that take place in cabs "with the driver's contempt in the mirror...

...later, they find a cheap studio on Grand Street—those were the days!— with the space he needs...

...Johnson does not allow her use of irony to undermine the reality of her characters or her purpose in writing...

...In the Night Café opens with beautifully realized episodes, full of unspoken tensions and poignancy...

...If I whirled on the red oriental rug to the music on the radio, I was going to be Pavlova...

...From its beginnings to its calamitous conclusion their relationship is recollected with searching, painful clarity...

...Joyce Johnson does many things in this novel that are no longer reliably found in the general run of literary fiction: She gives her characters antecedents, complicated emotions, recognizable backgrounds, and a context in which they can be understood...

...She delights in watching him at work: "Heseemedlike a dancer, so quick and light on his feet...

...Tom lives up to the generous impulse of his first question to Joanna...

...When, filled with characteristic self-doubt, she begins to take photographs (her feeling that she is "an imposter taking pictures" is probably connected to her father's having been a wedding photographer), he encourages her to follow what, after his death, will turn out to be her vocation, photography...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Dissent, " New York "Times Book Review" Much of Joyce Johnson's new novel is about a young woman's first real love —for an older, previously married, terribly self-destructive painter—as remembered from the vantage point of her early middle age...

...As we learn from an initial section of the book, he has survived a childhood of almost total neglect—abandoned at birth by his father, brutalized by his alcoholic mother and stepfather...

...The novel closes with Joanna caring for Nicky, her own little boy from a short-lived second marriage (only glancingly described in the book) to a European filmmaker...

...No mother or father had ever put a crayon in your hand, taken an interest...

...The words that Tom addresses to Joanna the night of their first encounter, "Why do you hang back...

...What impresses Joanna most is Tom's complete absorption in what he is doing, his obliviousness to everything but the colors and shapes taking form under his brush...

...When Joanna was nine years old her mother proudly paraded her child prodigy through the offices of one unimpressed theatrical producer after another, until one of them actually gave her a small role in a Broadway musical...

...And like a good many of the talented people who bellied up to the Cedar Tavern bar, he is increasingly less able to satisfy his desire for a life of " furious, burning moments" through his work...

...The love affair of Joanna Rose and Tom Murphy and their brief, troubled marriage in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s comes to an abrupt end one night when Tom is killed driving home drunk on his motorcycle...

...This suffocating parental attention has left Joanna with little self-confidence, less sense of what her actual abilities might be, and devoid of a future beyond the fitful pursuit of the "acting career" that her mother believes in far more than she...

...If I wrote a patriotic poem about the war effort, I was another Emma Lazarus...

...Tomakealiving, Joanna does temporary office work...

...It is not hard to see why she should think so, or why so soon after they are uttered she should give herself to him...

...Heis singlemindedly and defiantly committed to Abstract Expressionism, treating it as a sacred vocation at a time when it is some years past its ascendancy—indeed, about to be replaced by other styles, all variously hostile to its credo of untrammeled self-expression...

...seem to her to contain "the entire painful puzzle of my life...

...The notion of acting vanishes shortly after Tom moves in and she is forced to support him as well...

...Long stretches of Joanna's narrative address Tom in the second person, a device that might seem intrusive if it did not reinforce the intimacy that Johnson achieves in the novel...

...Her writing style is clear, colloquial, without pretentious mannerisms...

...I never knew whether it was me who'd landed that part or Ma, " Joanna remarks to the reader...

...Mark's Place, held for the very '60slike purpose of celebrating the end of the world...

...On occasion it is unobtrusively lyrical, as when Joanna speaks of Tom's stretched canvases leaning against each other on a rack as "sails without wind...

...The moving penultimate chapter, first published as a short story, describes his stay in the children's wing of a New York hospital...

...Regret for the life she might have made with Tom and gratitude for what he was able to give her are the predominant emotions of Joanna's narrative, but there is as well an undercurrent of anger at having been forced into the impossible role of his savior...

...he turns more desperately to alcohol...

...Her eventually having to tell Nicky about Tom provides yet another occasion for pathos, as does the boy's near-fatal illness...

...He is at once neatly identifying her exaggerated hesitancy in the face of the demands of adult life and implying that she has been withholding much that might be of value to others...

...Perhaps what impresses most about In The Night Café—it is also a salient characteristic of the memoir of her life with Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Minor Characters—is the author's patient, undismayed determination to make a connected narrative out of lives that strenuously resist connection and connectedness...

...At the outset they are happy together in a way that none of Joanna's previous relationships (she has had a string of affairs with more or less unsatisfactory men) has prepared her for...

...Joanna's admiring emphasis of Tom's apparent self-sufficiency reflects her sense of the many things about him that are entirely beyond her experience...

...His recklessness (fortunately, one cannot help but feel) loses him custody of his son...

...Glad of the challenge, she gravely undertakes to make herself into "an artist's wife...

...Joanna is then26,Tom35...

...He represents for her the possibility of a spiritually fulfilling existence, of life as it can be lived most intensely...

...Remembering him attack the "bare white field" of a primed canvas, she observes that " You were alone with it, you always had been...

...She has no corresponding sense of mission...

...Shortly after Tom'sdeath, Joanna visits his first wife, by whom he had a son, and spends the afternoon recognizing her dead husband in the child's least gestures and intonations...

...Along with his rugged good looks, it is his manifest dedication to his art that draws her to him...

...Joanna and Tom first meet in the spring of 1963, at a crowded, frantic little gathering in a railroad apartment on St...

...He moves into her little apartment on Seventh Street, filling the place with his rolled-up canvases, covering the walls with brushmarks...

...His one gesture at workaday financial responsibility is fruitless—he takes a job as a market researcher and is quickly fired...