Customer Reviews

The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The Elusive Embrace was well written but was it worth it? This is a memory piece by a fortyish gay male who interweaves his Jewish family's history, his sexual life in New York's Chelsea district, his reminiscences of sexual coming-of-age as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia (the least graphic, and probably the most beautiful and evocative prose), and Greek mythology, at which, as a classics prof, he is expert (useful, but pedantic).

Having achieved a sort of stellar lifestyle compromise--lectureship at Princeton, sexual freedom in Manhattan, and a close relationship mentoring a baby to whom he is almost but not quite a father figure--we wonder why Mendelsohn felt compelled to write about it.

As the song goes, the author is "his own special creation." I guess all gay men are. I have a feeling, though, that Mendelsohn's life story was highly edited to make it more acceptable to a gay readership. We don't hear about what it's like teaching at an Ivy League school, and only passing reference is made to the author's heterosexual experience, or to his life as a graduate student. His life emerges as a coherent work with an awful lot of thimble-rigging, string-pulling and myth-quoting--more than would have been necessary in a more straightforward account. I agree with the earlier reviewer who said the author bit off more than he could chew. Beautifully written, but not too satisfying.

Although the premises of Mendelsohn's fragmentary and redundant essays are always compelling, the style of this book is like reading through a haze of canvas. Some of the ideas explored involve the bipolarity of identity itself (people are and are not what they project synchronistically, partly because they cannot 'see' themselves in action -- only through interpretation); the identity of masculinity is and is not synchronistically a projection of ourselves and what we perceive as ideal masculinity (narcissism); Greek and Latin texts give us a clearer insight than any contemporary psychological treastise; fatherhood -- what males can produce and how the father was produced -- is the ultimate laboratory for masculinity. Mendelsohn's book is swamped in subjective assumptions and perceptions, which asks the reader to accept quite a lot from a total stranger. Also, Mendelsohn's love life is truly too boring and mundane as a foundation for much of anything, let alone the eye-opening discoveries that he wishes us to accept ("And then I went home with another beautiful young man...."). Written in a style that would put Henry James or Marcel Proust to sleep, the book would have made a far better essay for 'The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review,' rather than 200 pages of theory.

At first I was intimidated by the customer reviews that made mention of the author's use of classical references as I am not classically educated and often find such references pretentious. However, I am happy to report that Mr. Mendelsohn's work is compelling and always easy to follow.

"The Elusive Emrace" is equal parts memoir and essay, filled with keen observations and poignant scenes from his life. I was especially moved by those involving his god son Nicholas, and the final sections dealing with ancient family secrets and myths. His prose is beautiful, and his ideas about the duplicity of identity, how we are all many things at once, are succinctly articulated.

I highly recommend this book, though I do have one caveat. On page 82 (of the paperback) the author notes that all the happy gay couples he knows have sex outside of their relationsips. He follows this observation with the gross generalization: "This is a fact of gay life." It may be a fact for some gay couples, but certainly not all. It sounds like the author is trying to justify his own suspect promiscuity by proclaiming it to be the norm. I would advise hime to reference his own comments from page 38: "Knowledge may make you aware that the certainties of others are often more convenient than true, allowing those who hold them to live a coherent and sensible life, allowing their choices and their ideologies to make a kind of sense."

If you're a navel gazing, self-obsessed posey aesthete who praises himself under the umbrealla of supposed 'self-exploration' then maybe this book is for you... a really egregious book. Shouldn't have been written. Or at least published....

The author melodramatically and unrealistically describes certain events and people of his past. For example, in pp.179-181, he depicts the gay Southerners who attend parties and make out at the "Big House" as if they were hothouse highborns doomed by their decadence to gruesome deaths. "Only I survived," he writes on page 181, "I and the tall boy from the famous Richmond family." How romantic that only the author and his love interest survived. But wait a minute, only TWO survivors from this series of parties? And no women, besides the hostess, were ever in attendance? The more you consider these scenes, the more implausible you realize they are. You expect better effort than this from a Princeton lecturer who earlier in the book slights his own grandfather for employing explanations "filled with high emotion and low motives," and who purportedly attempts to construct a narrative that examines the riddle of identity.

Mendelsohn tells us about his "immaculate apartment", the "perfect parties" he gives and what "all my Chelsea friends think". I can't stand to be in the same room with self-absorbed people like this and found all the navel-gazing unintentionally hilarious. This material belongs in the "Styles" section of the Sunday New York Times.

Mr. Mendelsohn sure does have an ambitious idea in this book, but it didn't succeed for me. If all the ideas he put forth were as deeply explored as his treatment of classical literature motifs at the beginning of the book, I would have loved it. It also would have been 3 times longer. As written, I find his ambition overshoots his action, and found this book more frustrating than anything else.

I will get straight to the point and say that I hated this book. Did the author simply want to justify his own infantile outlook on life by writing what amounts to erudite "lyrical" prose defending irresponsible selfish behavior? Perhaps he wanted to exorcise the collective demons of the gay community (the book seems saturated with guilt)and defend men that behave similarly. It bothers me that the author cleverly manipulates a text that is never quite an autobiography nor a political manifesto, musing on important political topics and always relating them to lust ("desire") in a manner that must appeal only to his own vanity. This book is a complete step backward in the gay movement as it never talks about how things should be but only justifies the way things are by mainly citing ancient texts and casual examples from the author's life in New York City. His chapter on "Multiplicities" promotes promiscuity as an integral part of healthy relationships and proports that all the "successful" gay couples he knows (I guess those are the ones that vacation together and have dinner parties) are unfaithful to one another. When a trick has chicken pox, he rambles on about the dangers of "multiplicities" when the word that he is using really only means "being a whore". This book seems more like a cultured version of the idle chatter promiscuous gay men have with their gay friends (when their boyfriends are not around): a series of useless erotic anecdotes through which the author tries to form a pact with his gay readers to always remain boys, like the disciples of Peter Pan.

Book reviewers are too fond of the word "lyrical," and they often overuse it. For this reader, when a book is truly lyrical, it begs to be read aloud. But more than that, it must have rhythm, cadence, a song. Alas, what author Daniel Mendelsohn has done is crafted precisely that: the song of himself.

I bought this book in June of 1999, and read it too quickly. I came back to it after the new year, and read it once more. Again, I found myself being gently amazed by the writer's graceful prose, complex insights, and respect for his readers' intelligence.

Too often, gay nonfiction tends to be dogmatic, hysterical, uncompromising. "The Elusive Embrace" recognizes that life is a collection of layered and ambiguous realities -- that the answer is not necessarily A or B, but both A and B. At the same time.

As a gay man, I'm often conflicted about the dualities (and contradictions) inherent in my life. Many of us are. And what the author succeeds in illustrating is that the real essence -- and difficulty -- of living is not lamenting those, but indeed embracing them.

I am intrigued by the wide range of reactions expressed by reviews thus far. Personally, I found this book to be a gem of significant worth. It works on so many different levels - certainly as a memoir of gay experience, but it also has much to say to the heterosexual community. I found myself identifying with many situations, thus yielding a rites of passage perspective that was at once familiar yet totally foreign and thus intriguing. The writing is lyric and evocative, demanding your active involvement and stirring your intellectual juices. Fascinating tidbits from classical literature are just icing on the cake, but they too are presented such that they also catalyze your thoughts and challenge your perceptions. Gay readers may have to allow Mendelsohn some room for poetic license and straight readers will have to suspend their homophobia, but the rewards are well worth the effort. This is a beautiful, passionate, and stimulating narrative that, one can only hope, will be followed by more such efforts from author Daniel Mendelsohn.