GLR May-June 2024

movie star whose husband is a closeted gay actor, invites him to take a break from the studio and move into her house so he can do serious political writing. The frenzy of parties, drinking, and sexual escapades that follows reaches a climax in the penthouse of a Las Vegas hotel, where Madeline assembles her minions for a Day of the Dead party. Fueled by alcohol and Dexedrine, the guests—a satiric mixture of writers, scientists, professors, and hangers-on—babble sophisticated nonsense all night. George, who has reason to fear he has been entrapped by Jack, wanders the party in a stupor. At dawn, the party comes to a startling climax that confirms the worst of George’s fears. Once again, he flees. The brief coda that ends the novel is set in Paris. George has found his home and his purpose. He belongs in the Old World, where he was born. He writes for a film magazine. Once he meets Jean-Marc, an actor, George has an eleven-year “streak of happiness.” It is now the early 1980s; we can guess what will

end George’s happiness and eventually his life. Jean-Marc dies of AIDS first. The novel’s narrator, a young man George and Jean-Marc picked up in a bookstore, cares for George when he becomes ill and learns the story of his life. In the novel’s moving ending, the narrator uses words that echo the screenplays George once wrote to sum up what his life has meant: “You loved who you had to love. Your gift, your life, was an entire planet. You traveled here and looked around, you tried the food, you talked to people, you took your pleasure, and you left.” George bore the weight of the worst horrors and per secutions of the 20th century on his shoulders. Eventually he was able to lay down his burden, forget his fears, and live the life he was meant to live in the time he was given. From Eccle siastes’ “For everything there is a season” to CarpeDiem , “seize the day,” this is one of the oldest themes in literature. This com plex, compassionate novel is an impressive achievement for a young author who has a promising career ahead of him.

Mary Shelley’s Two Summers of Love

I NTEREST in Mary Shelley’s mes merizing 1818 novel Frankenstein has been having something of a renais sance in recent years. The reboots of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his nameless, beleaguered creation include the Oscar winning movie Poor Things , adapted from Alasdair Gray’s sweeping novel of the same name . And while the film is set in a world several decades after the original

French translation of German ghost tales, the gauntlet is thrown down. Byron sug gests: “Let’s each write a ghost story.” Percy replies: “Whoever writes the most frightening story wins.” At first, Mary is reluctant to participate. But one of the Ger man stories, about a mother, a daughter, and a monster, triggers some post-trau matic memories of the loss of her own child and conjures chilling images of four

R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK

MARY AND THE BIRTH OF FRANKENSTEIN: A Novel by Anne Eekhout Translated by Laura Watkinson HarperVia. 320 pages, $30.

Frankenstein and imagines “the Monster” as an elderly scientist who has inherited his maker’s art of creating life, an even more direct connection to the original work is Anne Eekhout’s Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein . Prepare to be scared—but frightened in a good way, as a successful ghost story frightens, tingles, lingers. The Dutch nov elist’s English debut turns Shelley’s “tale of misery and terror” on its side, proposing a compelling new back story to the well known genesis of the iconic novel. In addition to preserving the original’s primary themes of guilt, loneliness, and justice soaked

years earlier in Dundee, Scotland. It was there that fifteen-year old Mary was charmed by and besotted with the “unimaginably intriguing” family acquain tance, seventeen-year old Isabella Baxter. Having spent her en tire life in London, “the waves, the waves, the waves” along with “the wind, the wind” transport her to a destiny where “fear and love, imagination and truth coexisted on the riverside, in the undergrowth, under ancient trees. There was nothing that could not grow there. There was nothing that might not exist there.” They share common interests in macabre tales, Gothic

novels like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries ofUdolpho and Scottish “depictions of octo puses the size of whaling ships, swordfish with human features, such as a beard or a faint, unfathomable smile, and sea creatures that seemed to be half male, half female with breasts and beards, elegant, long hair, tough, muscular arms, and a fish’s tail.” Over the summer, desire develops into passion. Sitting beside a hearth’s fire, Mary feels a “longing [sing] through my body. Like a glowing knife ripping me open from my heart to my lower belly in the most loving way.” When they lay in grass blanketed in sunshine, Mary smells Isabella’s “sweat and soap” and “felt the urge to lift my skirt a lit

in revenge, Eekhout refreshes the story with elements of grief and imagined highlights of an adolescent Sapphic crush. Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein focuses on two influ ential, life-changing summers in Mary Shel ley’s life. Separate narrative lines move back and forth between 1816 and 1812. The 1816 episodes are set in atmospher ically gray and dreary Cologny, Switzerland, and recount the familiar gathering of nine teen-year-old Mary Shelley and poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori. One dark and stormy, laudanum laced, wine-drenched night in May, when the “rain falls and falls and falls” and the group of four have been entranced by reading a

Richard Rothwell. Mary Shelley , 1840.

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