Bob
Friedland’s Faded Love should come with a six pack, lace
panties, a pack of smokes and the phone number of a really good
lawyer. The characters in Love burn and pine long after their
encounters with lovers and enemies have faded; their hungry hearts
and hearty stomachs digesting booze, smoke, lust, and hate, as they,
like sharks, circle the waters between Asia and North America.
Freidland’s
prose is elegiac, crafted and composed, the arc of the stories zigzag
around the world, offering opportunities for characters to emerge and
disappear and reappear like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. Plus
plenty of opportunities for sex.
Faded
Love opens in France but spends most of its time beating around
the back wastes and hotels of Canada. The heaviest arc of stories
concern the relationships between On Ning and Alex, a lawyer, who is
devoted to her, so much he abandons his wife and family for the
challenges and exotic sweetness a relationship with On Ning offers.
The On Ning stories are the heart of the collection, and I wonder
what Love would look like stripped down to their only their
bodies? What would Love look like then?
The
other stories in the collection are about loss and love, and about
women’s scents and men wearing their masculinity like a hammer, and
like an oil field, always in motion, motion, motion.
“Oil
Patch Sketches” a series of stories revolving around Pig Eye, the
brute oil driver who struggles to manage the harsh wilderness of
Alaska and the rough work hands that live there remind me of Eastern
Shore watermen, how many drive their bodies hard in every facet of
their lives, becoming flinty, tough creatures.
Throughout
Love Friedland slices racial conflicts open like squash ready
to be gutted and grilled. The interactions of the Jewish protagonist
with his Chinese mistress allow Friedland to illustrate how enlarging
and challenging a bicultural/biracial relationship can be, how it
affects one’s rhythms and consciousness, but in other stories
anti-Semitism and racism snake through characters lips, and
Friedland’s prose lends authenticity to the bald hate festering in
the corners of the world.
As
Friedland crisscrosses the globe, we see pointed, destructive desire
smoldering in the hearts of men and women. Eros, lust, the straying
beat of a lover’s heart. Faded Love haunts, it is elegiac,
and at the same time frustrating. Many of the female characters, with
the exception of On Ning, are whittled down to desire. And there is
nothing wrong with that, mind you, the title of the freaking
collection is Faded Love, but I couldn’t help but wonder
about Jane, or Alex’s wife who allows her husband to stray as if he
were a library book to be checked out. What are they feeling? What is
their story? Aren’t they faded too? We don’t get to hear their
story because they aren’t brimming with desire, at least not that
we know, and not just for hanky-panky, mind you, but to feel alive
and enlarged, in this case by love, and maybe that’s Friedland’s
point, that to live is to desire, to sniff deeply of the earthy
stuff, and tramp about for adventure and broken hearts.
Comments