Customer Reviews (2)

This 1960 novel draws on Green's U.S. years and indulges in too many nonessentials.
(The product illustration and ISBN-10 correspond to the 1990 edition by Quartet Books, London, which is the one I have.)

24-year-old Irish Catholic Wilfred Ingram arrives at the old manor Wormsloe of Uncle Horace, who is dying. He encounters his aunt, superior Mrs. Howard and her son Angus, and Protestant cousin James and his wife Phoebe. Only Phoebe is kind to Wilfred, and inspires instant lust and love in him. As a Catholic, Wilfred baptizes the old roue' Horace, who fears dying unsaved and who secretly gives him a big envelope containing old love letters and photographs and a dozen shares of significant worth. After the funeral, all head back to the New York area. (Actually, author Green never specifically names locales.)

Wilfred lives in a mediocre single room, with a crucifix above the bed. He works as a shirt salesman in a big store. The great schism in his existence is his compulsion to sleep around with a succession of easy women, in disturbing conflict with his faith.

Wilfred has encounters with his aforementioned relatives, and is ever more determined to possess Phoebe. He has a half dozen male acquaintances. And the majority of characters are disposed to discuss the Catholic faith with Wilfred. Actually, he's a pretty average 24-year-old who knows desire overrides faith and he is terrified of sexual disease. (Condoms are never mentioned in this 1960 novel, nor are telephones, but a number of letters do figure into the plot.)

I was struck by Part I at Wormsloe (90 pages) in which the main characters are skillfully etched and thrown into confrontation. In Part II in New York (250 pages), however, Green reverts to his familiar practice of detailing every thought, emotion, and behavior of the protagonist who, be it he or she, is a middling human being and not the stuff of heroes.

As a novelist, Julian Green shunned an outline. His method was to create characters and see where they led him. In this book, we get well-turned incidents, convincing dialogue, surprises, but we start to perceive that the author is laying a lot of groundwork so finally he can veer off into whatever direction strikes him to achieve a conclusion. When it turns out one character is a mental case with a gun, we feel that Green has just been embroidering much of the time.

Catholics may better appreciate this novel than other readers as it encompasses desire versus faith, the crucifix, the rosary, baptism, confession, communion, mass, extreme unction, forgiveness, salvation, preparation for death expected and unexpected.

Sublime Incandescence
The story begins with the arrival of a young man at a small country station in the United States of America. As his origins are poor, his relatives only send a rude young coachman in a cart to fetch him and take him to his dying Uncle's opulant home in Virginia. On the way he loses a glove: an act of definance which destiny is there to meet.
The characters in this book all struggle with their emotions, their sexuality, their age, their appearance, their faith and their emptiness in the earthly night which flares up at the end of the book, as if the door opened by death allows in the hope of resurrection.
This novel describes the journey of a soul which hides, which tears itself apart and saves itself, a bildungsroman in which the heart is the final arbiter of the presence of love in human lives.
From the gothic landsacepe of Virginia to the confusing dreamscape of New York City, the narrator infuses an angst that epitomizes the restless feel of inadequacy the protagonist suffers and betrays when viewed through Julian Green's style of sublime incandescence.
(Quartet Encounters Publication - translated by Ann Green) ... Read more

Product Description
The first American edition of Green's second book, his first published in America. ... Read more

Product Description
Love in America chronicles the arrival of a young French man in America. Still grieving the loss of his mother, Julian Green accepts his uncle's invitation to spend three years at the University of Virginia. He feels instantly at home in the land of his parents and embarks upon a journey that will he lp him come to terms with his sexual identity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Julian, who dares not speak his love for 285 pages
Julian Green (1900-1998) was born in Paris to American parents, his father a Virginian and his mother a Georgian. She imbued her son with an appreciation of the South defeated in the Civil War. She died in 1914. Julian converted to Catholicism in 1916. In 1919-1922, his father sent him to the University of Virginia, though Julian was not keen to leave France.

Love in America is the third of the 4-volume autobiography Julian wrote in the mid-1960s. The prose is "white": unadorned simplistic declarative sentences denoting his movements, generic thoughts and emotions, the stock conflict of purity and carnality. He knows himself to be a homophile and is repeatedly flabbergasted by beautiful male faces that he dare not look in the eye or address. The book just goes on and on and on with these identical stifled experiences. His fantasies never sink to animality--but oh, to hold the Other's hand, to embrace, to kiss!

Finally he does speak to handsome "Mark" and is not rebuffed. Their friendship remains pure; neither quite knows what is going on in the other's mind, heart, soul. But something of importance has been resolved in Julian, and not staying at the university for a fourth year, he returns to France.

The book is terribly bland for the modern reader but you can whiz right through this "white" prose.

An insight on coming to terms with being gay in the 20's
It must have been hell in the late 1910's, early 1920's, to finally admit, in one's early twenties, that one is gay.(Well, it's still not that easy now for all too many people.)

This is the autobiography of a very sensitive young man who found himself transplanted from France to live in the Southern US and attend the University of Virginia. (Quelle shock!) I found it an interesting and heartwarming insight on living in the South as well as coming to terms with being gay...and even falling in love. ... Read more