ASA, AS I KNEW HIM

by Susanna Kaysen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 1987

Dinah, a 30-ish Jewish proofreader, recalls her love affair with older, married, WASP-y Asa Thayer, her boss at a Cambridge, Mass., magazine--in a literate, often stylish first novel that tries hard (without real success) to transcend the shallow characters and romantic/cultural clichÉs. In a short opening section, Dinah summarizes her on-the-sly affair with handsome, placid Asa, editor at a ""second-rate, quasi-academic"" journal, heavy on travel/ science photos and such. For her, Dinah says insistently, the romance was a ""search for the Yankee soul"": an attempt to transform Asa by sharing her Jewish warmth with him, lifting him out of his blue-blood New England blandness. (Yankees-- ""translucent, misty, soulless""--have ""forgotten how to grunt."") Then, in a longer middle section (95 pp. out of a 159 pp. total), Dinah offers a reconstruction--based on what Asa has told her--of his traumatic adolescence in the mid-1950's. Son of a Cambridge doctor, attending Choate, young Asa--shy, nice, bland--is best friends with charismatic Reuben Sola, handsome, blond, daring son of a rich Jewish professor. According to Dinah's retelling, this obsession with Reuben (though not consciously homosexual) is ""quite simply, the best love he'd ever known."" So, when Reuben's wildness ends in grindingly predictable tragedy, grief-stricken Asa suppresses his budding Soulfulness (""No more myths""), retreating into ""dormancy"". . .until Dinah comes along 25 years later. And, in a concluding chapter, Dinah suggests that ""I was just the reincarnation of a bad blond boy"" for Asa--who ""genuinely wanted passion and danger. . .but had neither."" When not straining for eloquence (""From his long, pale limbs I will make, by words, the body and blood of a human""), Kaysen writes with crisp, tart effectiveness. There's smartly detailed observation in the evocations of 1950's Cambridge and 1980's office-life. (Locals will easily identify the real-life magazine in this roman d clef.) But Asa's coming-of-age scenario is heavily derivative; Asa himself is every bit as bland as Dinah claims him to be--while she herself is faceless, never extending beyond her adolescent infatuation. (Think of Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were, minus the charisma.) And the dubious cultural generalizations combine with the simplistic psychology to suggest a scorned lover struggling to disguise bitter retaliation as something more mature or insightful.

Pub Date: April 30, 1987

ISBN: 067975377X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Vintage/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION