News
June, 2015
New York Times CdF
Link: Charming Monster
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style, as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert admitted, and in his spectacular novella “Coup de Foudre,” Ken Kalfus has created an equally articulate monster. First appearing in Harper’s and collected now with his latest short stories, “Coup de Foudre” is a thinly — or possibly barely — veiled account of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, in which Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper at a New York City hotel. The criminal charges, which led to the disclosure of a hidden world of sex parties and erotic compulsion, came to nothing. But Strauss-Kahn eventually paid a hefty fine after a civil action, and his reputation was ruined, perhaps because of the question that was impossible to ignore: “What made him do it?” What would cause the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, wealthy and successful beyond measure, to risk everything in such a fashion?
There’s no simple answer. But one role fiction can play is to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical, to see the invisible, to describe, as Kalfus’s narrator, David Landau, cagily informs us, “the hidden lineaments of the universe.” The story is told from Landau’s point of view, as a letter to the housekeeper, and it’s chilling evidence of how easily the truth can be made to lie.
“You must wonder how I could be so smart and yet think so recklessly,” Landau offers at the beginning. “This was, however, exactly the man I was, the man I am today, the man who would save the European economy.” Yet he’s also the man who can fantasize about being masturbated “in first class.” Kalfus enters the mind of a megalomaniac who conflates his own ruin with that of the European economy — “Governments have fallen from Dublin to Prague” — and whose most gracious gesture, in his view, is to answer what seems to him the burning question: How could he assault a woman so sexually unappealing? “Every person is worthy of sexual attention,” he tells us, as if he spoke out of kindness instead of delusion. “Our fundamental human dignity demands it.” “Coup de Foudre” isn’t an easy novella to read, but it’s certainly easy to misread — as, for instance, an apologia for a brute. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a writer daring to imagine the unimaginable.
To describe the hidden lineaments of the universe — Kalfus continues this theme in the 15 stories that follow. The result is overpacked. For every perfect, beautiful story (“Square Paul-Painlevé,” with its possibly enchanted park bench) or wild intellectual experiment (a paean to the unpublished entitled “The Un-”), there are stories like “City of Spies,” “Shvartzer” and “Mr. Iraq” that feel as if they belong in a different collection. But perhaps that’s complaining about a box of chocolates having too many cordials. The very joy of a collection is that you can skip the cordials, and somebody else might love them.
Like the novella, the best work here presents a moving exploration of the ambiguous nature of reality, storytelling and the passage of time. One character, having just emerged from a dentist’s nitrous oxide haze, writes of the world as he now sees it: “Some people walk the pavement on the verge of tears. Others have just realized that they’ve fallen in love. Everyone lives in a story. . . . I’ve returned to the world, which is no more comprehensible than it ever was.” A beautiful way of putting it: that we can approach but never touch a shared experience of life.