Novel about couples in Washington, D.C.
Written: Oct 08 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well-intentioned novel about couples in Washington, D.C.
Cons: Neither the story nor the characters are compelling enough.
The Bottom Line: This book means well, but it just is not interesting enough.
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| letrouvere's Full Review: Paul Kafka-Gibbons - Dupont Circle: A Novel |
Dupont Circle: A Novel
by Paul Kafka-Gibbons
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
2001
248 pages
I wanted to like this novel, but, unfortunately, I didn’t.
Bailey Allard, a widower in his sixties and the father of three grown children, is a federal appellate judge living in a large house near Dupont Circle in Washington, D. C. A young female law student named Louisa comes to live in one of the empty bedrooms of the house. She has a boyfriend who is a medical student in another city. There is some friction in their relationship, and they eventually break up. Bailey and Louisa discover that they are attracted to each other, and enter into a relationship.
Bailey’s son Jon is in a committed gay relationship with a young novelist named Peter. They are raising the two children of Jon’s mentally ill sister, who was unfit to raise the children.
Eve and Max are Bailey’s two law clerks. They are also in love with each other. Eve becomes pregnant, and the couple plan to marry.
In the background of the stories of the three couples is pending appellate litigation connected with the issue of gay marriage. The fictional premise of the case is that the state of New Mexico has recognized gay marriage. Two men who had been married in New Mexico have come to live in the District of Columbia, where their marriage is not recognized. They filed a federal income tax return as a married couple. Because one of them had a high income and the other very little income, they would pay less tax as a married couple than they would as two single individuals filing separately. The Internal Revenue Service has challenged their tax return, since they are not recognized as married in the place of their domicile. Bailey will be one of three appellate judges on the panel hearing the case.
The story seems somewhat promising, but the promise is not fulfilled. Except for the one character who is mentally ill, the adults in the book are very serious, politically correct, one-dimensional lofty thinkers. Attempts at mild humor in some dialogue never actually succeed in being humorous. The characters seem to have no doubts or mixed feelings about anything. They seem quite content to live the lives of well-behaved upper-middle class people. They apparently have no spiritual yearnings. They are earnest careerists. Louisa and Bailey, for example, are quite happy to discuss appellate litigation seriously as they lie in bed after making love.
One might think that the book could be of especial interest to gay people, but the gay characters, Jon and Peter, are especially boring. They appear to socialize only in their family circle. Do they ever socialize with other gay people? Do they go to gay bars, gay discos, gay gyms, gay beaches, gay churches, or interact in any way with gay institutions? Apparently not. Do they like leather, Maria Callas, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland? Heaven forbid! Of course not. They are evidently too politically correct to engage in any stereotypical behavior. They are not the Boys in the Band. They are the boys who are bland. They live to raise children, to work, and to have meals together. The choice of a partner of the same sex is all that distinguishes them from the rest of the population. Such a couple may constitute a good argument for equal rights, but does not make for interesting reading in a novel.
The novel is written throughout in the present tense. I generally prefer the past tense in novels, but I do recognize that the present tense could be quite effective in a novel that presents dramatic slice-of-life scenes in a cinematic manner. Here the use of the present tense just seems like a failed attempt to be hip.
There is never really any dramatic tension in the book. I never wondered what was going to happen next. Only when Louisa read an e-mail message from her boyfriend who was breaking up with her did I find myself taking any interest in what a character in this book might be feeling.
A curious aspect of this book is that one of the characters is a novelist who expresses thoughts about novel-writing that one senses could be those of the author. “The thing about novels . . . is they require steady application. They’re not hard to write, in the sense that if one manages a thousand words a day . . .for a hundred days, one has a medium-length novel. The trick is to produce four pages that bear some relationship to the previous and successive four. The trick is to end up with a sheaf of pages which are about something—interconnected lives, a coherent plot, distinct characters. . . . This is composition, the making of [expletive not allowed by epinions] up.” The author appears to have had good days and not so good days in the course of writing this book, but the pages that he produced did not add up to a very satisfactory whole.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
letrouvere
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Member: John Pierce
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 7 members
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