MEDITATIONS ON LOVE & CATASTROPHE AT THE LIARS' CAFE

Two lovers contemplate their relationship along with philosophy, subatomic physics, and other topics in Bernard’s romance.

The novel begins with a vaguely described and possibly violent rupture between a woman named Sasha Kamenev and her boyfriend, Pascal, who then repair to the titular bar to rehash and ruminate over their years-long, intermittent relationship. The story unfolds as a series of dialogues between the duo that are dominated by Pascal’s long soliloquies, with the more reticent Sasha interjecting comments that tend to puncture his grandiosity (He: “let’s live in a big, soft windblown bubble of enchantment, a fantasy of what life might have been if our gods had been kind and wise and not what they are: rocks and wind and exploding suns and galaxies driving across space like hurricanes.” She: “Will you please shut up?”). These exchanges reveal next to nothing about the material circumstances of their lives, dwelling instead on the emotional friction between Pascal, who vacillates between claiming to be ardently in love with Sasha and affecting a stance of alienation from love in general, and Sasha, who adopts a cooler, warier attitude toward the domineering Pascal. The conversations broaden out to explore Pascal’s worldview, touching on his misanthropy toward the “shabby, flawed, shameless…lazy or brutal or stupid” run of humanity; his Nietzschean sense that individual autonomy and happiness are the highest goals; his resentment over being rejected by women he is attracted to (Sasha being a rare exception); his horror at the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting; his trepidation about AI’s potential to become humanity’s master; and his impressions of the Higgs boson. In her responses, Sasha usually upholds countervailing values of love and connectedness, but occasionally gives way to her own pessimism, at one point declaring herself a new species because humankind is such a disgrace.

With no plot to speak of, Bernard’s novel is essentially a chamber piece about two people cautiously inching their way toward—and sometimes away from—commitment, through a thicket of digressive thinking and talking. The prose is dense and elliptical, with philosophical disquisitions suddenly erupting into cryptic prose poems (“Virtue won’t make you happy. Not vice, not money, not love. Happiness makes you happy, then it bores you and you decide to try misery just for a change. Though escaping misery is not the snap that escaping happiness is”). The author is often self-indulgent, but he’s also a gifted writer; when he hits, he’s capable of gorgeous lyricism. On a seashore, he conjures “[t]he endless distant roll and crash of waves along the beach, the lulling confusion of whiteness, a serene and tranquil drama raving and collapsing without a pause from horizon to horizon.” Bernard also delivers penetrating insights into love and its failures: “Did you ever realize how divorce destroys in a particularly cruel way even the happiest memories of a marriage? How every memory of some joy you may have had is poisoned by the knowledge of what followed?” Black-and-white photos—portraits of prim Edwardian children, anti-portraits of adults with their faces blurred, snowscapes with the outlines of trees and light poles barely visible—lend an arresting, ghostly visual aura to the story.

An undisciplined but often captivating love story, filtering strained emotion through vaulting intellectualism.