THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406010449
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: C2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Medium
LOUIS BEGLEY
{REST} Alfred A. Knopf. 148 pp. $21.
\ \ EVERYONE COULD USE a friend like Max Strong.
Max, the narrator of Louis Begley's nicely told third novel, As Max Saw It, sets out to relay a story about other people - a tale that tracks a college classmate and the man's lover. However, in so doing, Max demonstrates his own impressive talent for friendship.
The novel opens in the early 1970s, when Max runs into his Harvard classmate from 20 years earlier at a party in Italy. The reunion with Charlie Swan evokes little nostalgia.
``There are people one knows for long periods of time without any element of choice having entered into the matter. They pop up regularly in a defined context; when at some point they disappear, one doesn't miss them. So far as I was concerned, Charlie belonged in that category.''
Charlie, a celebrated athlete and womanizer in college, is now an acclaimed architect. He's also a foul-mouthed drinker. Max is surprised both by Charlie's graceless personality and by the fact that Charlie is traveling with an astonishingly beautiful young man named Toby.
He's further taken aback when Charlie claims him as a lifelong friend, telling Max that ``Henceforth, you are one of my intimates - they are very few!'' As Max sees it, his own talent for human ties is rather meager. Never married, he's been deserted by his live-in girlfriend. ``Relationships did not stick to me,'' he comments.
Even his career - he's a professor of contract law - denotes a cool distancing. ``You see, I am curious about obligations,'' he says.
Although Max is initially disturbed by the nature of Charlie and Toby's relationship, his life becomes intertwined with theirs. He encounters Charlie and Toby in China. He buys a house in the same small New England town where Charlie owns a home. Toby becomes the assistant of a professor who teaches at Max's university.
Over the years, Max observes Charlie's passion for Toby, a passion that survives the younger man's faithlessness, drug use and perpetual immaturity.
``(Toby) is sweetness incarnate, but his conversation has not been refurbished; one finds it dull. In a way, it is like his looks - the beautiful face of an adolescent paired with the body of a young man menaced by incipient thickness - at the midriff, perceptible ever so slightly about the cheeks - which is more dangerous than baby fat.''
Charlie's passion lasts through Toby's illness and death - from AIDS, although, in a subtle touch, Max never names the disease.
Despite Max's protestation that he has little gift for relationships, his friendships with Charlie and Toby demonstrate otherwise.
Most notably, Max serves as a respectful and thoughtful nurse in Toby's last days. He doesn't recoil from the disease's physical manifestations. And, upon noting that Toby's extreme thinness makes his eyes seem huge, he remarks that they are ``clear and luminous, and so gentle that I (think) that all that was good in Toby had been concentrated in them.''
Fans of Marcel Proust will find familiar names and themes in this memoir-style novel. But one can easily appreciate Begley's elegant writing and delicate emotion without a knowledge of those references. As Max Saw It offers an absorbing portrait of friendship and its meaning in one's life. by CNB