THE WEB

by Andrew Harvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 1987

The mannered and pretentious second installment of Harvey's projected trilogy. In last year's Burning Houses, 30-year-old Charles was a gay English writer living in Paris and melodramatically chronicling his longtime platonic love for the bisexual and married Mark, who finally opted for home and family, leaving Charles bereft. Charles' friends were Adolph, an extravagantly showy old queen who was dying of cancer, and Anna, a hip, rootless songwriter. There were overtones of Oriental mysticism, spoken of in a languid, froufrou sort of way. This same little drama is repeated here. As the present episode begins, Charles is a 32-year-old gay writer living in Paris who has decided to go to America to search for Richard, a former semi-platonic love (a little mild petting) who has disappeared. It turns out that Richard is merely avoiding poor Charles, and has decided to get married to a nice Jewish girl named Carla; so once again a bereft Charles returns to Paris and to Adolphe, who is taking longer to die than Tito, although he's doing it with more style (""Adolphe received us the next evening lying on his sofa with nothing on but a white kimono and a tiara, surrounded by nine burning candelabra""). In fact, when he and Charles learn that songwriter Anna has found happiness in India with a 15-year-old village girl as a guru, Adolphe decides not to die at all--and the two of them pack up and head east. Little more than a rerun of Burning Houses, with much of the story being told through the effete letters between Charles and Adolphe, the kind written by precocious undergraduates. Affectation dominates; and there's too little of anything else here, in all, to pry these characters away from a fixed view they seem to have of their own navels.

Pub Date: April 22, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION