Who stole my heart away?
Paul Sussman
THE LOVE LETTER by Cathleen Schine Sceptre, £5.99, pp. 257 Ican't remember when I last wrote a love letter, but I'm pretty sure it didn't start `Dear Goat' and conclude with a eulogy to peeled oranges. But if the effect on frumpy middle-aged siren Helen MacFarquhar is anything to go by, this is evidently the surest way to a modern woman's heart. Cathleen Schine's delightfully intelligent, helium-light comedy of sexual manners D. H. Lawrence rewritten a la Mills and Boon — is less about a love letter per se as the effect that missive has when it arrives, out of the blue and anonymously, on an eager divorcée's doormat. She is flirtatious small-town bookshop owner Helen, a super-fit 40-something tease who runs her business with a benign rod of iron and whose affections are the goal of every man, and most women, in the placid seaside resort of Pequot, New England.
For Helen control is all. She manipulates those around her with the deftness of a carnival cardsharp, bestowing a suggestive handshake here, an angry lip-curl there, and sending customers who come in for the latest John Grisham novel away with a couple of Julian Barneses and The Brothers Karamazov. 'I am the maestro,' she admits modestly. 'The puppeteer, the dominatrix of suggestion and half-acknowledged desire. I am the flirt. I am an artist.'
Her manipulative, tautly-ordered existence begins to ping apart at the seams, however, when she is the unwitting recipient of the eponymous love letter. Uncertain who it is from, or, indeed, whether it is intended for her in the first place, she becomes obsessed by the mysterious billet-doux, constantly re- reading it, scanning its contents for hidden meanings, absorbing its passionate sugges- tiveness and eventually allowing it to pro- pel her into a torrid affair with hunksome teenage shelf-stacker Johnny.
A subtle analysis of the intricacies of passion thereafter unfolds within a not very subtle tale of a woman bonking a man 20 years her junior. If the plot is at times lead- en, however, it is unfailingly buoyed-up by Schine's trilling narrative style and piercing eye for the less obvious nuances of human behaviour. Protagonists are pinned-out and taken apart like frogs on a dissecting slab, their secret worlds revealed with insight and wry wit, and the book's real strength lies not so much in its hackneyed storyline as in its jaunty characterisations and playful probing of the foibles of America's upper middle-class.
Helen in particular is a marvellous cre- ation. By turns curmudgeonly and groin- crushingly sexy, soufflé-soft and hard as nails, she makes confused middle-aged motherdom appear not merely acceptable but positively alluring. A sort of Mrs Robinson in lycra jogging pants. Witty, sophisticated and quintessentially American, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if it does taper off into boredom and anti-climax. But then that's love for you.
Are you the swine that's been rubbing noses with my wife?'
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