Rich lives shimmer in 'Moonlight'
Are the rich different from you and me? If you wonder, read Charles Dubow's second novel, Girl in the Moonlight (*** out of four), which seems intent on proving as much as it seduces readers with a tantalizing, salacious tale set in a world of lovely people untroubled by money matters — but troubled nonetheless.
Dubow picks up where the great literary arbiter of enormously wealthy lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald, leaves off. But don't be thinking The Great Gatsby, since this first-person narrative of passion and prosperity starts in the early 1960s, when Dubow's protagonist, Wylie Rose, then a shy 10-year-old, first sets eyes on the stunning Cesca Bonet, an exotic beauty two years older than he is.
Trying to impress Cesca, Wylie falls out of a tree and breaks his arm. That brief, childish encounter at the privileged Bonet family's beachside Hamptons estate improbably alters the rest of young Wylie's life. He can't stop thinking about Cesca; he doesn't want to stop. When they eventually meet again six years later, their casual sexual tryst seeds the next several decades of Wylie's obsessive pursuit of his irrepressible Siren.
As in his acclaimed debut novel, Indiscretion, Dubow finds certain themes as irresistible as Wylie finds Cesca. Almost every page here is watermarked with love, lust, wealth, creativity, betrayal or heartbreak. Melodramatic? Certainly, as Wylie at one point describes making love to Cesca: "Fierce, passionate, relentless … like finding out that God is real and how Columbus must have felt when he did not sail off the edge of the world."
But Dubow's clever and effortless narrative somehow makes it all compelling. And that "somehow" is the incredible allure of Cesca, a sensually drawn and emotionally dangerous character the author no doubt fell in love with, as does Wylie, as does the reader. Did we mention that Wylie's father Mitch warned him about the Bonet family he himself had been so intimately tied to? "They're beautiful, talented, rich. It's all very seductive," he says. "But they're like spoiled children. They'll take everything and give nothing in return."
Most of Dubow's characters tend to be attractive, intriguing and idly rich — people who do whatever they want because they have nothing better to do, and because they can. Even for Cesca, that means having one affair after another, getting engaged several times, breaking off engagements, breaking Wylie's heart repeatedly, and escaping to chi-chi locales in New York, London, Paris, Rome, Venice and Barcelona.
The eccentric Bonet family includes the novel's key personalities, especially Cesca and her brother Aurelio. Their father is a renowned Spanish artist, a globetrotting bohemian bon vivant divorced from their American heiress mother. Wylie befriends Aurelio, a genuinely talented painter who encourages him to study painting. Indeed, these are the times when dreams fuel every moment.
Other times, the run-on narrative detours seamlessly like a rambling conversation at a posh Upper East Side cocktail party — about Cesca's friend Emma and her drug problem in London; about the Alfa Romero-driving Yale-educated Brit who adores Cesca in Vienna; about Aurelio's terminal disease, his red-light district atelier in Barcelona and his solo show in Manhattan; about the daughter of French royalty Wylie loves ... until Cesca shows up again.
Keep in mind the adage about doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. But as Wylie puts it, Cesca "was the partner of my secret self. ... She was all I had ever wanted even though she gave me nothing. Yet she gave me everything." By definition, he is madly in love.
In the end, you don't so much root for Wylie because you embrace him; you root for him because you embrace love, at least the idea of love. And you embrace the idea of a woman like Cesca — which is why the rich may not be so different from you and me, after all.
Girl in the Moonlight
By Charles Dubow
William Morrow, 352 pp.
3 out of 4 stars