'After Camus: A Novel': The ghost of Camus haunts an American couple

Albert Camus was a French author and “absurdist” philosopher who fought in the French Resistance and died in 1960 in an automobile accident at age 46. He has been an influence in the life and work of author Jay Neugeboren since he first read Camus’s novel The Stranger at 17. 

Finally, after writing 21 books, 11 of them prize-winners, Neugeboren has given birth to After Camus: A Novel, a strange, well-written novel with complex, odd characters who pop off the pages into the reader’s imagination. 

After Camus traces a marriage and a love story against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and the growth of the Right-wing Le Pen movement in France. 

In the novel, Camus himself is a ghostly presence central to the story of Saul Davidoff and Tolle Riordan, who meet during a Vietnam War protest. As a young dancer and choreographer, Tolle had a brief affair with Camus in Paris shortly before his death; after reading Camus’s The Plague, Saul decided to specialize in infectious disease.

The novel

Tolle spends great portions of the book contemplating suicide. Her career as a dancer was cut short after a horseback riding accident. Therefore, she taught dance. Her mother had been a dancer, who had to abandon her passion to look after Tolle and later blamed her daughter for ruining her career. Her Irish father blamed Tolle for injuring the horse.

Neugeboren describes him as someone whose nose had eventually increased in size due to “a lifetime of fidelity to maintaining traditions that derive from his origins” – he drank a lot. Tolle’s mother, on the other hand, had nose surgery to decrease the size of hers, in an effort “to disguise her telltale Jewish origins.” 

Tolle considers her parents so awful that she decides to divorce them. To this end, she drives with friends from New York to her parents’ home in Hadley, Massachusetts, informs them of her decision, and then gets back into the car and drives away.

Saul, a secular Jew whose father contracted polio and died young, has devoted his professional life to AIDS patients. He can recall the beginnings of the disease when all he could do was hold his patients’ hands as they died, often in excruciating pain. 

In the hope of repairing their marriage, Tolle and Saul return to a village in the South of France where they had lived when they first fell in love. Camus had also lived there when he was recovering from tuberculosis. Fiona, a former colleague and lover of Saul’s who is dying of cancer, comes to visit. Saul and Tolle’s daughter Julia, unmarried and pregnant, also arrives for a visit. Julia bonds with Fiona, but it is unclear whether she understands the nature of her father’s relationship with the dying woman.

While After Camus is not pornographic, the author is frank when discussing the characters’ sexual encounters, which often involve multiple participants. 

Neugeboren’s keen observational and analytical skills have Saul remarking how much quieter dinner is at a restaurant in France than in the United States because the French bring their dogs but not their children to restaurants. The author defines this attitude toward children as “one of many examples that showed why the French, unlike Americans, rarely looked back on their childhoods with affection. The French neither worshiped nor idolized childhood – what children looked forward to in France was escaping from childhood.” 

Tolle is obsessed with Camus and talks to his ghost throughout the book. She tells him how clever he was “to have died so soon after we met so that the love could never devolve into the quotidian vagaries, betrayals, resentments, and ennui that seem to plague all love between human beings, and that, given your proclivity for sexual dalliances (and my own), would surely, with time and distance, have done us in.”

An interesting though bizarre book – a nod to the writings of Camus – about the survival or death of love and friendship.

The reviewer’s memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s (Chickadee Prince Books), is available online and in bookstores. 

AFTER CAMUS

A NOVEL

By Jay Neugeboren

Madville Publications

321 pages; $22