NO LIGHT FROM HEAVEN

A work of autofiction that revisits Zimmerman’s complicated, doomed-from-the-beginning first marriage.

Mel, the author’s stand-in protagonist, is 22 years old when readers meet him in 1961 on his way from San Francisco to visit his friend Jack in the latter’s Berkeley apartment. An aspiring writer, Mel has just secured his creative writing bachelor’s degree. Without a summer job and nursing the pain of several short-lived relationships, he is once again looking for love. Marlena enters his life; a striking sexual adventurer of Italian heritage, she is six years older than Mel. He is immediately smitten, but Marlena is the girlfriend of another resident in Jack’s building, and she is more attracted to women than to men, anyway. For a time, Mel tries to keep his distance, but the intensity of their mutual attraction is not to be denied. So begins a lengthy, tumultuous, angst-filled love affair that displays elements of a physical and emotional sadomasochistic relationship, with Marlena in control.  Mel struggles with his attempts at playwriting while studying for his graduate degree. He accepts an out-of-state university’s offer to be a creative writing instructor, which leads to the couple’s continual separations, during which Marlena takes up with a variety of female lovers. Still, they marry, and as the narrative meanders through the social and musical signifiers of the late 1960s, it takes readers through the couple’s five troubled years of matrimony. Zimmerman lays out the defining parameters of their relationship early in the saga: During one of their breakups, in a moment of painful clarity, Mel tells Marlena, “The truth is, you’re my enemy. You get inside me and destroy me from within. And the worst of it is, I let you do it.” In lengthy passages, Zimmerman dwells on the details of their sexual relationship, which he describes repeatedly and graphically. Occasional copy-editing oversights notwithstanding, his prose is steady and engaging, skillfully communicating Mel’s emotion-laden obsession with Marlena and her wanderings while maintaining a narrator’s distance. Though Mel finally leaves his nemesis/inamorata behind, this erotic tale is exhausting for protagonist and reader alike.  

Intriguing, poignant, and well-written, but sexually overloaded.