Customer Reviews

The Conversion

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Saturday, April 25, 2008. I read The Conversion cover to cover today. While I read it entirely in one sitting, I didn't do that because it was so suspenseful that I couldn't put it down. Instead I found Olshan's latest to be a very comfortable read.

It is hard for me to describe, but somehow reading The Conversion was like reading one of my travel journals from 10 years ago. Familiar, but with enough time and distance had passed so that details of the events seemed new. Because the characters and story seemed familiar, this was an easy and very comfortable book to read.

Though many of the story's elements are anything but comfortable--the hotel invasion at gun/knife point and the entire topic of sero-converting--the characters handle these situations like people I know would handle them. I found myself bringing my life into the reading of this book as much as this book brought new topics and details to my life.

While there were dramatic situations in The Conversion, the overall feeling of the book is one of a subtle, yet nagging, mystery that winds through all the character's lives.

It always amazes me when a book can make me feel this involved and this comfortable with new characters that instantly feel familiar.

Let me start off by saying that this book is written in a more literary style, and I don't intend that to denigrate, particularly because of the book's self-reflective quality. At one point, the main character Russell (who is a one-time-published author) remarks on another character's (also an author) work's accessibility (he had feared it would be written in an overly literary style), and I wondered if the author was expressing his own concerns about the novel, right there within it, out of the mouth of the main character. Speaking of the main character, I found he treads just on the border of likability - he comes across as a defeatist in search of a happiness that he will never let himself have, buffering his ego with affairs with married men and delaying his own realization as an author by his own infatuation with the obfuscation of his own skills by his obsession with the literary world society and the gentrified world of the American seeking some sort of entry into a class they can never truly belong to by immersing themselves in European culture and language. The main character's one relationship with another man who is truly available to him is more about his own relationship with how he perceives his own credibility, as an author, and just adds to his gloomy introspectiveness. The real relationship in the book is between the main character and an Italian woman, Marina (you guessed it, also an author although a wealthy and established one), whose villa Russell is recovering in after an unusual (and somewhat unbelievable) turn of events. Marina is actually for me the best developed and most likable character in the book, and she's the pivot point around which Russell's self-conception evolves. It's really the only genuine relationship Russell has. The book is very well written, and it is accessible despite the "literary" prose, but at the end of the novel I felt that some of Russell's "progress" was just a veneer. Maybe that was what the book was trying to accomplish, was to show that although he had changed during the experiences he was having, that in the end he can't escape his own nature. Still, I was left feeling a little cheated at the end, as if I deserved something more revealing, something that would have left Russell as more empathetic, more a person with something to say to me, not just to himself. In the end, I don't think Russell really sees a way to move on from his own selfishness, just a way to develop it in a different direction.

While THE CONVERSION is, at times, beautifully rendered, rarely have I completed a book and felt such a sense of disappointment. Perhaps this was because the evocative, fast-moving--and, yes, sexy--opening 75 pages made me feel I was in for something special, and yet the ending dawdled, looped back onto itself, and finally dwindled into mere nothingness. Loose ends were not tied up. (Who were the intruders? Were they hired assassins? Who threw the rock? Who received the insurance $$$? Why couldn't/didn't Russell find SOME SORT of substantive love?) While I had a sense that a "conversion" was taking place within Russell, at end I simply couldn't tell you just what this was. It was far too subtle, if it occurred at all. Frankly, he seemed much the same as he did at the book's inception. And even on the final page the reader is given a new twist regarding the book's European publication that seems to solve nothing and, frankly, just made no sense to me. THE CONVERSION is like a fast-burning firecracker: startling bright and beautiful at the beginning, at end one is left with the charred remains of only what could have been...

This is definitely a page-turner. Olshan has layered his novel with
so many personal histories that the title, The Conversion, suggests a
guessing-game as you progress into the story: what happens next?

If you liked last year's Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, or
loved the Ripley books or all those novels by Henry James like The
Aspern Papers and Roderick Hudson and so on, add a new volume to the
library. Just when you thought the subject of innocent Americans in
Europe was exhausted, here's a book with yet more twists and turns to
the narrative of possibilities. To summarize the plot would be
superfluous. You'll be hooked from the first page, when you meet Ed
and our narrator, Russell, whose love for Ed is insufficient for a
happy ending--or is it? Every chapter snaking back and forth through
time introduces a new complication. Even as one story strand becomes a little
clearer, a new one comes up.

And I love fiction about writers. My favorite chapter, after a
galloping read through the main action, was in fact the epilogue.
It's not a spoiler to quote Russell's personal epiphany that comes
after all is said and done (after he's had a chance to redeem himself
for betraying his dead admirer, in a fashion that is convincingly
brought off by the author). Russell is a discouraged writer, and his
summing-up of his efforts to begin again as a writer in the wake of a
life previously lived (at the beginning of the story and as
periodically recounted throughout the novel) with a superior artist is
simple and touching:

"Anything I managed to squeeze out didn't seem to be mine, but rather
something anybody could do. Part of my difficulty was remembering
what Ed had written about me in his memoir, his droning doubt that I,
being the sort of person who puts his love life ahead of his writing
life, would not go very far in my career . . ."

As for how exactly this simple revelatory piece fits into the puzzle,
I leave it up to the next reader to divine.

Olshan's latest takes place mostly in a historical Tuscan villa whose rich history contrasts the drama that is played out within its walls. The book arrives with a rollicking narrative whose twists and turns keep you guessing until the very end. Along the way, we are treated to gorgeous and very acute cultural descriptions of France Italy, such that only a person who speaks the language could give us. This is also one of those novels where the writer's alchemy keeps adding layers to the characters so that by the end, we come to know them very intimately and see all their virtues and contradictions. Along with lots of lapidary prose comes some very sexy moments.

Because the title is The Conversion, we have to be aware of the conversion(s) at work here, but which one? Conversion of one's religion? yes. Conversion of one's HIV status? yes. Conversion of one's gender? yes. Conversion (translation) of various manuscripts from one language to another? yes. It's all there.

The narrator is a talented prettyboy author who has a thing for married men on motorbikes. He also seems to land on his feet each time something bad happens. The world is there to take care of him and solve his problems. He gets to live in Paris and in a huge villa in Tuscany. He doesn't really have to work that much. He might be the accidental target of some kind of international terrorist plot. Complications upon complications ensue. I reached a point where I didn't care what happened to him next. I didn't find the character of Mme Soyer to be at all credible. I didn't care for Marina, the powerful Italian woman who seemed to be controlling things.

There are stories within stories. The worst one is probably the priest who is deliberately passing on his HIV to unsuspecting men. At times, the writing is gorgeous. At other times, I just wanted this novel to be over with, and I wasn't unhappy when I finally reached the final page. We are told on the book jacket that the author is a creative writing teacher, and I don't doubt it. His own writing style is just too self-conscious and (to use one of his narrator's own words) "lapidary."

The life of leisure in Europe, going from fashionable Parisian places to a vast and ornate villa in Italy, is a lifestyle we have read about before. The details here are plentiful and indeed it is a bit of travelogue in itself. Clearly, the author knows his locations well.

This is a fine read, and I find it very satisfying. In the end, this is all about Russell and really nothing more. Just as he is the center of attention for other people's physical advances and support, he also is adrift at the time without a real motivation to do much more than live a somewhat glamorous life in Europe on other people's dimes.

The external plot here is a vehicle for Russell. Most of the intrigue is not resolved as it is not central to the story and character development. This is no mystery story, but rather an episode in the life of a perhaps talented man passive at this stage in life. The story is a prop to convey Russell's life and parnerships. In the spirit of Holly Golightly, Russell enjoys his European stay and learns a bit about life.

While I enjoyed this book, it also had frustrating elements. The quite meandering, lyrical plot development, while pleasing in some ways, means it is less than gripping. As well, several plot points are never resolved (the real identity of the masked marauders who burst into the narrator's Paris hotel room in the opening pages, for example.) While this didn't concern me greatly, it might irritate some readers who prefer works to have genuine denouements and not to leave elements hanging.
However, the self-referential, "post-modern" literary games are quite fun: one of the principal characters has herself published a novel - in Italian - called "Conversion", and there are several other "conversions" which are central or incidental to the plot. Moreover, the narrator's only published work is a novel about the drowning of a lover and thus parallels Olshan's own "Nightswimmer".
It is an extremely cerebral book - for all its discussion of love and emotion, I found it strangely devoid of emotional connection. For a novel whose central character has relationships with three different men , it is also curiously unerotic. For me, none of the narrator's relationships - even those he describes as obsessions - quite ring true.
All in all, a well-written, entertaining novel, but not an entirely satisfying or memorable one.

Olshan's ("Nightswimmer", "Clara's Heart") latest novel tells the story of Russell Todaro, a young gay American with a knack for getting into impossible relationships. After being abandoned by his lover (a priest), he decides to use his facility for languages to "find himself" while on an assignment in France, where he meets and falls for Michel, a married Frenchman. When Michel decides he must end their affair, Russell then hooks up with Edward, an older American poet temporarily living in Paris. While Edward is infatuated with Russell, the younger man isn't ready to commit to him, and the two fall into a kind of friendship-with-benefits, until one day when Edward dies of a heart attack in his sleep, following a break-in by a group of terrorists. Russell accepts the invitation of Marina, an Italian writer who was a friend of Edward's, to come to her large villa in Tuscany, and assumes he can finally relax and put his life in order. However, Russell learns that the terrorists that accosted him and Edward in Paris may be here too, and it also becomes apparently that Marina's invitation may have had ulterior motives. Pressure from Edward's editor to release his memoirs (which Russell has, but believes Edward did not want released in its current form), as well as the reappearance of Michel, and another handsome (but married) lover in Tuscany, make Russell's life complex.

A beautifully written, intelligent story, with descriptive, almost lyrical phrases that allow the reader to share Russell's experiences abroad. It's a novel of love and loss, of truth and deceptions, and of redemption as well as failure. My one complaint is that the story is perhaps a bit too complex, with a myriad of mostly unconnected subplots that distract the reader a bit from enjoying the book fully, and which are never really resolved by its end. Still a powerful, recommended read, four stars out of five.

Joseph Olshan (author of the wonderful "Nightswimmer") has given his readers another terrific novel to savor. "The Conversion" is, without
a doubt, a page-turner, a suspenseful narrative full of beautifully delineated, complex characters who leap off the page in their vividness. (This is especially true of Russell Todaro, the young gay man whose uneasy journey hooks the reader from the very first paragraph.) The prose itself is graceful and evocative--I often found myself rereading passages simply for their elegance. What a rare treat it is to read a literary novel that is as compelling as it is well-written!