Where Love Touches Death

...Jiri may not be wrong...

...We are listening to the endless complaint inside the head of an at best mediocre playwright named Landau, who is in Prague for the First International Kafka Congress (which some might be surprised to learn does not actually exist...

...To which Nina responds, with good sense mirroring Landau's understanding that the Holocaust dead don't need him or Krakauer, "They're not immortal, Leo...

...Testing her...

...Has he stolen his best stories from Primo Levi...

...And it doesn't make them any happier that people are coming to see them...

...The second, longer novella attempts something quite different...

...But they are complicated moments...

...Thus she acquiesces when he sends her to Paris alone, though she is suspicious about why: Is he discarding her...

...Characters like these don't demand amplitude for expansion...

...Sadly, it has been hard to care much in the midst of Leo's diligent hectoring, and hard to feel secure about not caring...

...He can't get beyond his ego...

...Nina is incredibly moved by the story...

...What remains, finally, is the challenge Prose lays at her readers' feet to understand the complexities of memory and mourning without degrading them, to grant them a human face but not replace them with all-too-human self-aggrandizement...

...Leo, dragged by Nina to see the graves of the long-suffering women she reveres, cries out, "The truth is...

...Now all the props are poised for the dagger of her ironic wit...

...Here you are...

...History has picked up our lives and given them hard little kisses while your generation has been left virgins, unkissed, on the shelf...

...You shitty writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia...

...we are in an Eastern European city whose history lends dignity even to a great pretender and his tale...

...The "Kafka groupies" love this "celebrity based on nothing but bad luck, then good luck, endurance, nerve, resilience, no Survivor Guilt for this guy...

...Leo is the ultimate uncommitted man, a connoisseur of self-centered spontaneity: "It was a matter of pride for them both that their romance was based on passion and not on tedious analyses of every gesture and word...

...Leo eventually shows up and tenders a dubious excuse for having sent her off by herself...

...Billie Holiday, that now-canonized mistress of pain, stands as an icon on one side of Nina, and Orpheus, destroyed (perhaps, perhaps not) by fatal concern for his Eurydice, stands on the other...

...You know your lives have no meaning so you distract yourselves with sex...

...Are the coincidences of his survival, not to mention the survival of his tireless libido, fantasies...

...they exist as perfectly fleshed-out intelligences, but not multidimensional person as we want to need to live with to encompass...

...plays, your bullshit...

...He is like the archetypal old Greek "satyr" in Phillip Lopate's celebrated essay "Against Joie de Vivre," who manages to ensnare everyone he encounters in the myth of his naughtiness because it is so useful to the corresponding myth nurtured by his admirers...

...Simone de Beau-voir, "Sartre's handmaid and pimp, editing his manuscripts, sending him her cutest girl students not even getting laid...

...Not for the first time, Leo, the ultimate cynic, who seems to be devoting his life to pricking Nina's balloon—I use the operative verb that defines their relationship in forms her that within a year of "digging up his wife and howling over her grave," Danton married "some nubile 16-year-old cutie...

...Instead of showing off with an unlikely bevy of dedicated young beauties, Krakauer invokes his own significant accomplishment: During his two years in the camps he "somehow conducted a love affair with Kafka's sister, Ottla...

...The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you...

...Resurrected-Saint"a performer of indefatigable energy who is forever on the brink of heart failure...

...And what have you done...

...Who the hell's going to visit the grave of a guy who wasted his life editing newsletters for hypochondriacs and cheap greedy retiree tourists from Connecticut and the Jersey suburbs...

...warp and woof are considerably less dense...

...Here commences a peculiar story, both cryptict here are little mysteries strewn along the way that I for one could not solve and a thicket of references through which a didactic path is cut...

...There is a distance difficulty here: Clearly we are meant to stand at a critical remove from Nina and shake our heads at the way she seems to be trying to understand and justify her life, with and without her lover, by embracing the flawed female soldiers of the sexual wars...

...If he'd wanted that, said Leo, he could have gotten married...

...And, of course, lots of frequent flyer miles...

...author, "Before and After," "Civil Wars" Francine Prose, when she is at her considerable best, knows exactly the subjects that have her clear signature on them...

...But who is right...

...And so forth...

...Played cops and robbers during the Vietnam War...

...I don't mean having sex, I mean having sexual problems that you whine about in your books...

...She makes cogent observations: French TV features an endless succession of pigs being slaughtered by farmers and their old comfy wives—Nina sees three pigs dispatched in five daysbecause the Right wants to put forward a subliminal image of tradition and ancient down-home verities to assure their candidates' election...

...plus passing references to Jean Seberg and to the pathetic heroines of Jean Rhys and Edna O'Brien...

...Its schematic references begin to take the place of real characters, as if the presence of Claudel or Beauvoir in the margins can substitute for the life of Nina that's missing from the center...

...The reunited lovers almost succeed in making Paris the familiar site of their previous passion, except Leo is intent on researching a story for his magazine called "Paris Death Trip...

...Then gone on, making money, not making money, writing your silly poems, your...

...Prose has amassed a whole world of intriguing facts: When Rodin locked his studio to make love to one of his models, he placed a sign on the door that said, "Absent...

...There is even a reprise of Jiri Kra-kauer's disgust at the complacency of those history has not challenged...

...Every page of "Three Pigs in Five Days" is interesting...

...Just as he is being led through the hell of history as if he were on a little boat cruising the waters of Disneyland, so his inflamed consciousness guides us through the experience of the Kafka Congress participants as they witness the point where love touches death and fantasy meets reality...

...Landau, abject and unfulfilled, "reaches back to Kafka for consoling proof that the soul food of the arts is sexual torment and deprivation...

...He helps get a group of gypsies thrown off a crowded bus, a mean act that is presumably a pre-emptive strike before they can lift someone's passport...

...What I miss in the second novella, and what the first one richly provides, is Francine Prose's unique skill at embodying our eccentricities and uncertainties in tales that do not educate so much as they mock, mourn and laugh...

...Again and again, hearing the heroics of Krakauer's sex life in and after the camps, Landau is reduced to wondering "Who is the cornier writer...

...meets an old lover of Leo's...

...In the end, momentarily rising above his own insulted vanity, Landau faces the more profound question posed by Kra-kauer's posturing: Do the six million need his defense "against this dying mediocre writer...

...Nothing that has happened to her during her tour of Paris, before and following her lover's arrival, justifies her affirmation...

...How small you are, how microscopic," Jiri flings at him...

...In "Guided Tours of Hell," though, we are not lolling on a yacht in California...

...As if for the sole purpose of driving Landau to fits of splenetic jealousy, Krakauer, with his "gangsterish mane of snowy hair," has been appropriated by the alluring director of the Congress...

...His checking out cemeteries, catacombs and every similar depressing site he can imagine, combined with the acrid taint of Right-wing politics in the air, does not put him in the most sanguine of moods...

...It is an unsettling pleasure to dislike Landau only slightly less than he dislikes himself...

...Prose appears to want to have it both ways with Nina: Some of the time we are asked to take her seriously, unironically...

...You neurotic American guys, "Jiri accuses in a bravura turn...

...Jiri's sins are many and real, trivial and tremendous...

...Visiting cathedrals...

...She sets forth theories: Perhaps Orpheus only turned around because, being just another competitive macho guy, he wanted to challenge Death, "to pit his music or poetry against Pluto," and wanted to be sure Eurydice saw what he achieved for her...

...For Prose's purposes, the novella is precisely the right form...

...Unfortunately, the center of all this insight does not hold...

...Her previous work moved gradually from the finely observed domestic scene of her early stories into a world of hip strangers and "real" events...

...And while its minor puzzles remain unsolved, the novella's quite earnest political and informational agenda is so blunt that I kept thinking there must be more to this, more of the true mystery on which fiction thrives, just out of my line of vision...

...Jiri Krakauer or real life...

...The point is to be happy when you're alive...

...He knows the answer: "The dead no longer need Landau, nor do they need Jiri...

...Eager enough to play his game as long as Leo favors her, Nina is careful not to pressure him...

...Did I say sex...

...In the title novella she treats us to a few perfect moments of an emblematic spectacle "beyond literary criticism, beyond plausibility, kitsch, way beyond good or bad taste...

...In the face of every proof that death and treasonous love must undo all of us, Nina chooses to place her faith in "doomed impossible hope," the "grand ridiculous gesture" that issues from and perpetuates love...

...Landau, in Prague, had more than a few clues to his inadequacies...

...This is prime Prose territory...

...They are way beyond caring about who's telling the truth and who's lying...

...Far, far worse, he makes a fetish of the venality of the Survivor, whose atrocious acts of self-preservation become a kind of pornography to titillate the listeners of a new generation...

...Landau, who has written a play in the imagined letter-writing voice of Kafka's fiancee, Felice, is not prepared to be reverent in the face of "Mr...

...As a matter of fact, they're dead...

...The hints Landau gives of his life at home are no less superb for being compressed: One of Prose's sharpest skewerings of an all-too-recognizable egotism shows a bewildered man wondering why his wife is furious when he deals with her problems indirectly in his play about Felice: "He'd expected her to be moved by how well he'd listened and translated her pain into art...

...Jiri is the ultimate profaner of the souls of the dead, because he spins their tragedy into the gold of his own reputation—and yet, and yet...

...But Prose has decided to keep us in the dark about it, and the result is a woman of poster-flatness...

...That Leo has very little interest in who she is and where she has come from to share a little corner of his life is Nina's problem...

...We seem to be enjoying a miniresurgence of midlength fiction Jane Smiley has published notable examples, David Leavitt has one in the works, Alice Munro's stories get longer and more intricate with every publication, and Chronicle Books has inaugurated a novella series, small rich morsels that fit easily into a pocket...

...the novella lacks either a believable or an intentionally ludicrous soul...

...Add to that Nina's defensiveness at not being Jewish, as is Leo, while anti-Semitism bristles around them like Landau, who missed out on the Holocaust, she feels faintly deprived and you know why she is not having the trip of a lifetime...

...He insists that he slept with the girlfriend of the Kommandant as well, for as he proudly instructs his rapt listeners, in addition to the fact that she was pretty, you did what you had to do to get through, and she supplied him with Viennese pastry from the camp bakery...

...Larger-than-Life," "Mr...

...she doesn't want to ruin her very good thing exhausting and innovative sex, flattering, satisfying, yet always on Leo's terms...

...That path connects a handful of famous women who, presumably like Nina, allowed themselves to be ruled, abused, and/or dismissed by their even more famous lovers: Camille Claudel driven insane by Rodin's neglect...

...History has double-crossed him: It has kept him safe...

...In some hands the not-quite-long story, not-quite-short novel is as much an occasion for the investigation of character as the novel, but with curtailed elaboration and time passed...

...is mistaken for someone else and shown a secret cache of Rodin's erotic drawings...

...Where "Guided Tours of Hell" had a fairly straightforward focus the Holocaust Hero as Trendy Prophet, out of which fanned a good many related questions about sex, art, contemporary ideals, and the venal sin of tourism in all its vicarious ghoulishness—Three Pigs in Five Days" is diffuse, confusing, and finally too contrived to be compelling...

...Note that Landau does not dare to include his own name in the question, although of course that's what is gnawing at him...

...in the death camp, tromping on the unmarked graves of innocent women and children, and you're fighting some little fight in your head, squabbling with me, or may be with Papa, some ridiculous ego drama about writing or women or who gets to sleep with Mama...

...Part of the pleasure of this Prose is the intricacy of the questions she so cleverly puts to us...

...This bouquet of the wilting flowers of the literary world stinks in Landau's nostrils...

...it epitomizes the devotion she wants to believe exists in a world of faithless men...

...They don't know about it, Leo...

...I'm jealous that they're immortal, that the faithful are still making pilgrimages to their graves...

...Oh, that it were that simple...

...then we are induced to stand back and see her as an illustrative antimodel, utterly clueless...

...Krakauer, "a terrible poet and memoirist," strikes Landau as having all the tarnished trustworthiness of a professional Survivor...

...Nina works with Leo on a little travel magazine that he runs chiefly, it seems, so that he will have sanctioned reasons to vacation in the best of places...

...Not surprisingly, this is "a theory to which Jiri clearly refuses to subscribe," as regards himself or, for that matter, Kafka...

...Every-Man-for-Himself," "Mr...

...Landau himself is pathetically vulnerable in his self-disgust and his fear that his nemesis is correctthose who have gone through nothing have nothing of value to report...

...Nina spends time in what may be an old brothel...

...Three Pigs in Five Days" shows us another situation where sex meets death, but this time in an affair between a woman named Nina and her enigmatic lover, Leo...

...In the closing scene, Nina and Leo are told how Danton who figures in the goings-on in various way sex humed his wife's body (she died when he was away) in order to embrace her a little bit longer...

...He shamelessly drops the names of everyone from Milos Forman to the Dalai Lama...

...And what was that about turning others' suffering to one's own advantage...

...Who is the better writer: Kafka or Jiri Krakauer...

...You wish you'd gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag...

...Guided Tours of Hell" is driven by a single ramifying idea that would be harder to negotiate in a full-length work: Prose's intent is to confront us with the paradoxes of late 20th-century consumer-friendly horror-grazing...

...In fact, Landau calls to mind another infuriating voice whose creator stopped before he wore out his welcome, Dos-toyevsky's Underground Man...

...She still does not know if she has been subjected to a series of trials...

...But 170 pages is a long way to go with one eyebrow raised in disdain, the other lowered in solicitude...

...on the other hand, neither can his judge...

...It includes an elderly rabbi from Tel Aviv, a Croatian feminist novelist, a sexless Slavic languages professor from Vas-sar, who attaches herself to Landau, and the piece de resistance, object of Landau's fascinated contempt a Holocaust survivor named Jiri Krakauer...