BOTH the title of Amy Bloom's debut novel, Love Invents Us (Picador, £I5.99
in UK), and the epigraph from Hannah Arendt referring to "the great and incalculable grace of love", make great claims for love. Yet the message of this lively novel, as well as that of Bloom's earlier book, Come To Me, a short-story collection and a National Book Award finalist, is more cautionary than celebratory: "Love invents us? - heck no, it beats us up and then some." For sheer oppressiveness, levels of manipulation, mutual exploitation, emotional blackmail and the playing of the dependency game, love is hard to beat.
And so in her way is Bloom, another sharp, funny, confident and talented American writer whose witty, intelligent handling of her material avoids the sentimentality and mawkishness many writers exploring similar territory might well fall into. Elizabeth Taube, the central character and part-narrator, is a young girl with a flair not only for finding the wrong men but, worse still, for finding men who arc not only wrong for her and themselves, but arc also nice, pathetic and wounded and therefore even more difficult to escape from. She begins her story with a candour which is sustained throughout, and will either win or lose the reader with her opening sentence: "I wasn't surprised to find myself in the back of Mr Klein's store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable."
Tomboy Elizabeth, when not modelling the fur coats in Mr Klein's shop, wears green corduroys and a hooded sweatshirt. Her mother is a busy interior designer with little time for her - her father has even less. Mr Klein indulges his fantasies while dressing the girl in his furs and pays for his treat with Belgian chocolate. When he decides to stop driving the girl to school and taking her to his store, she is not relieved but heartbroken, baffled at his loss of interest in her. The importance of her little sessions with the fur shop owner is hardly surprising, considering the emptiness of her home life. "Every dinner was a short horror; my eating habits were remarked upon, and then my mother would talk about politics and decorating and my wardrobe. My father talked about his clients, their divorces, their bank accounts."
Very soon she is participating in the fantasies of Mr Stone, her English teacher. He begins giving her lifts home and also initiates her career as a babysitter. "I expected to be a good babysitter, even a great babysitter," she recalls. Elizabeth is not really a Lolita; she may shoplift and at times steals things from old Mrs Hill's house, but she is basically kind and is certainly not at streetwise as Nabokov's creation. Her entire life seems driven by a love-quest. Her parents predictably divorcee and Mr Stone becomes increasingly important.
Bloom is at her best when working in the first-person narrative, and she makes Elizabeth likable and very funny. On arrival at his house for her first babysitting stint, she reports, "Mr Stone practically pushed me through the front door." Mrs Stone then provides a guided tour of her weird art work: "the biggest picture," says Elizabeth, " was a corpse, a woman with her belly silt open to her breasts and little creatures - I didn't look too closely - miniature soldiers and animals climbing out across her body." When asked for her opinion, Elizabeth remains silent yet later recalls, " `it's trying to say something' is what my mother always said when she looked at things this ugly, but I couldn't say that. I did not want to know what these pictures were trying to say, or why Mrs Stone was trying to say it to me."
Her desperation to immediately please runs through the novel. As expected, this is at its funniest during the childhood phase. "I was the babysitter I'd never had. I was better than Mary Poppins because I didn't care what kind of people they became, I just wanted to be their favourite: I wanted them to despise other babysitters.
Their eyes got big and starry when I found the hot fudge and let them eat it out of the jar while we watched Million Dollar Movie. We played cowboys-and-Indians-in-outer-space until the twins collapsed in the hall, and then I wiped the biggest chocolate streaks off their faces and dragged them heels first up the stairs to their beds."
The Stone story becomes darker but Bloom manages to sustain a balance of sympathy for both her main characters, and Elizabeth's attempts to free herself, though doomed, arc affecting. As Stone becomes more abject, Elizabeth becomes more caring.
There are some technical weakness. Although the book is little more ban 200 pages long, Bloom is attempting a far bigger story. She wants to create a portrait of a life and in order to do this, she moves the book into the third person. The vivid intensity of the childhood sequence is lost as she tries to cover wider periods of time. Moving between the first and third person, the narrative eventually catches up with an older Elizabeth, a single parent, now 40 and about to reunite with the love of her life whom she has not seen for fifteen years.
Love Invents Us is fragmentary. Bloom is a natural short-story writer; she knows, nearly as clearly as Alice Munro does, how to take a moment and make it live. Although the more muted qualities of the later sequences arc probably true to the way life changes, it does leave this engaging, disturbing novel with a somewhat lopsided quality. Even so, Bloom writes very well and in Elizabeth she has created a living victim-survivor who is neither a martyr nor a complainer. What could have become a tract examining childhood at the mercy of adult desires and weakness, is instead a human, engaging account of an individual's relentlessly self-damaging search for love as a justification for, or even an endorsement of, life.
