The Quality of Hillel Halkins Longing

A novel of rare delicacy, Melisande begins with a clutch of erudite New York teenagers in the late 50ss and early 60s coming of age amid its enticements literary, spiritual, political, and sexual. Its the story of a narrator nicknamed Hoo; the nickname as well as the keenest emotional pulls of his adolescent years stuck with him, pulled at him still in middle-age and in ways he comes to understand, as novel unfolds, to have been good as well as bad. A book full of judgments, theyre wedded to a story sometimes achingly tough to read because of its wry, acute honesty, its wise, sad, but also strikingly hopeful attitude toward lifes demands and pleasures. When lived well, Hoo comes to understand, life is shaped by the smallest number of indispensable choices, most likely just one maybe two, with these defining who you are. 

Halkin, the well-known journalist, translator, and essayist, has thus produced a fiction, his first, that is at its core a stab at understanding little less than what most matters. The questions at the books heart are essentially philosophical, but Halkin is convinced that these are best sorted out in the messiness of daily life, not abstraction; its narrator, a retired classics professor, has published but one book whose subject is the medieval Arabic tome, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. 

The story begins with the narrators friendship with Ricky, a brilliant, muddled son of Communist parents whose emotional/intellectual trajectory will take him from a once-stalwart Marxism, soon tattered, to Dostoevsky, eventually to India and then tragically into the dank horrors of insanity. The times themselves are confounding, full of terrible, confusing jolts, often bizarre and discordant. Describing the late 60s, Halkin writes: There were sirens all the time in New York. The city was full of ambulances, fire engines, police cars, muggers, purse-snatchers, pushers, psychopaths, demonstrators, beggars, Hare Krishnas, three-card monte players, people talking to themselves. The parks were more dangerous than Vietnam. He follows Ricky whose maladies seem no less spiritual than psychological, the byproduct of an inability to make decisions either of solidity or coherence C with great affection and empathy for his scattered, earnest quest. 

The books portrait of adolescent male friendship is sharp, but from its start Hoos consuming love is for Mellie, the Mellisande of its title. Hoo himself is, as noted in one of the novels more elusive passages, shy, contrite, hungry, laughing, moody, blissful, capable. Mellie, as seen through his eyes, is among Gods greatest gifts. Spotting her for the first time in class, Hoo recalls his wondering, I ask: is she the bird or the branch it is sitting on? Everything, even the way she moves mesmerizes him. The other dancers had dropped out. You gave no sign of hearing anyone. It was twist music, but you werent twisting. You werent dancing to it at all. It was dancing in you. It ran through you like wind in a tree. It tossed you this way and that, wild but rooted. 

By no means is their love story uncluttered or straightforward. Halkin describes well Hoos late-adolescent meanderings,We offer over 600 parkingassistsystem at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. his hunger for sensation, not the least of which the oddly sweet sensation of rejection, of loneliness; his description of Hoos fits and starts, often fruitless and joyless, in steely beautiful but ever-inaccessible Paris, are astute. I wanted to watch a million sunsets, love a million women, walk down a million city streets and lonely roads. A million lifetimes wouldnt be enough for that. What he learns is that Mellie has bored deep into him, her being enveloping him with a wholeness best described as love. Encountering her again in his 20s, both now in graduate school at Columbia. 

Halkins evocation of young love is masterful. He builds a brief, but evocative section of the novel out of notes,Large collection of quality indoorpositioningsystem at discounted prices. small, random shavings of daily life, one or two line scribbles of Mellies that Ho has stuffed into books. Moments, episodic yet nonetheless crucial loom in his memory: Do you remember, Mellie? The cabin by the pond, the cold, cold water, our naked bodies warming by the fire? And then there are his depictions of the loudest and the quietest moments of bliss: 

We made love like tigers. We made it like gulls, crying out over the waves. We made it like eels, wet and slippery after a shower. We made it like snails, slow and sticky in our own secretions. We made it like moles, burrowing through our dreams until we stumbled on each other in the darkness. 

I loved watching you sleep.All I saw of you, turned to the wall with a pillow pulled over your head against the light, was your bare shoulder, from which the blanket had slipped as if the dawn had begun to undress you and stopped to stare in enchantment. 

It is the books middle section that is, no doubt, the most difficult to read when the realities of life seek to overwhelm the far brighter, grander expectations nurtured in adolescence and early adulthood: Despite her vivid intelligence, Mellie leaves her literature graduate program (unsurprisingly, her great passion is the Romantics). Hoo finishes his and takes a teaching job at Champaign that he assumes will be temporary but where he remains for the rest of his academic career. The small pleasures, mostly the mounting frustrations of faculty campus life in an isolated, insular slice of the country begin to weigh. Above all, there is Mellies infertility, the byproduct of a botched abortion (Rickys baby). The intrusive, pervasive presence of the small children all around them reminds Mellie of joys she is unlikely to enjoy; the humiliations,With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other howotipper products.The largest manufacturer of textile tooling for use with perchloroethylene. the ups, mostly the downs of fertility treatment and its eventual failure,Manufacturer of the Jacobs rfidtag. fights small and large, these all contribute to a downward spiral. 

They separate, although at the novels end it remains unclear whether this is permanent with Hoo convinced that whether permanent or not the love he feels is the same that he felt always. The novel even seems to suggest the prospect of something eternal about such love, transmitted across time, resurrected across the generations. Love is stronger than death, declares one of Halkins characters. Waiting for her now on a Greek island, retired early, living frugally, scouring a letter from Mellie with plans for a visit, he remains more certain than ever that if I had a thousand lives to live, Id want them all to be with you. The book is itself a love letter written for the purpose of telling her just this. 

This isnt the first time that Halkin, who settled in Israel in his 30s, set out in book form to imagine how it might feel to have lived another life. He did this in his first book, itself arguably a fiction of sorts, his stark, precocious harangue of the late 1970s Letters to an American Jewish Friend built as an epistolary exchange between Halkin the new Israeli and a Jewish friend in the United States, likely an inner wrestling with what he might have become had he remained in the United States and then sought to justify the decision. Already then his was a voice melding the lyrical and street-smart with only contempt for sentimentality (if you care to call a culture at all [in Israel] that hodgepodge that prevails here of debased ethnic tradition, petrified religious orthodoxy, rootless secularism, and blind aping of every latest fashion to arrive from the West) but emphatic regarding the essential linkage between conviction and behavior.