Love and Other Delusions

by Larry Baker

The story of a married woman's long-term affair with a younger man. An old story with new twists: the best sex scene of any 2012 novel (probably), the best literary foreplay of any novel in 2012 (for sure), a seduction aided by the singing of Harry Nilsson, and a tale told by two women, one of whom is crazy. In Alice's world, it all made sense. She told her husband, "I stopped cheating on you when I started sleeping with Danny." He finally understood, but too late. Alice Marcher is dying, but she is still trying to understand her life. She was thirty when she met Danny Shay. He was eighteen. Two years later, they were sleeping together. Twenty years later, they parted. Alice insisted, "It lasted so long, so it must have meant something, right? We weren't a cliche, were we?"

171 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2012

About the author

A rapidly becoming obscure mid-list writer, whose first novel, FLAMINGO RISING, was a Hallmark movie and whose second, ATHENS/AMERICA, is now invisible and unattainable.
My new book, A GOOD MAN, is about drunk radio talk show hosts, food, politics, and the possible Second Coming. It also involves a threesome with Nancy Grace, Ann Coulter, and a fictional right-wing talk show host.
Book is dedicated to Harry Chapin and Flannery O'Connor, but you gotta read it to appreciate why."

Reviews

[David Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dim the Lights

A review of Love and Other Delusions
by Larry Baker
Ice Tea Books, 2012
171pps, $14.95

In many ways, Larry Baker’s excellent new novel, Love and Other Delusions, is an old, comfortable movie house. One screen. Shabby brocade curtain. Lights on the ceiling that look like stars when the house lights go down. Where watching a movie is “like going to sleep and then dreaming.”

Of course, if you have read some of Baker’s other novels --much of The Flamingo Rising is set in a drive-in theater-- you know that movies have always figured big, and Love and Other Delusions is no exception. The main characters are Alice, her therapist Kathy, and Danny, her long time extramarital lover. When Alice first meets Danny he works as a projectionist and all around assistant manager in a movie house scheduled for the padlock. Alice and Danny watch movies, love movies, screw in an old movie house, and see their lives as a movie. Especially Alice.

The story is largely about the lies that dominate Alice’s life, and to a lesser degree the lives of Danny and Kathy, and how Alice does and does not deal with those lies. I could tell you that I counted, starting with the title, every incidence of the word “lie,” its synonyms, and their conjugated variants. But that would be a lie. I can say this: these words appear on just about every page, and usually multiple times per page. Fiction, invention, deceive, fraud, rationalization, stories, illusions, delusions, dreams, smoke and mirrors, and, my personal favorite, “cosmetics on a corpse.”

So, though delusion shadows the life of each main character, there are big connotative swings between “deceptions” and “dreams.” And if Danny is right, and watching a movie is like “going to sleep and then dreaming”, Love and Other Delusions offers a choice: toss and turn on the starched denotations of untruth; or, roll in the softer sheets of fiction’s ambiguities.

Alice is a woman who has lived a life of willing suspension of belief. She is terminally ill, and the narrative is driven by her need to confront her own delusions before she dies. Alice lies to protect other people; lies to protect herself; tells lies that she forgets are lies. And almost all of these are about Danny.

Alice is like a novelist or film script writer, putting words into the mouth of her lover and thoughts into his head in moments and places when they were apart. Writing a letter to Danny, Alice tells him “... in addition to being a a story, we are also a movie. I remember our past life in terms of visual cinematic moments, complete with a music soundtrack.”

But what is a life stripped of delusions? One of my favorite scenes is in the projectionist’s booth of the old movie theater. In a three-page deconstructionist lesson, Danny shows Alice what “really” goes on to create the illusion of a story out of light and color on a screen. He adjusts knobs, ignites arcs, open lenses, switches reels. Alice is thrilled that Danny shares this with her. But in giving up one delusion, she builds another around Danny’s love for her.

In the psycho parlance of the decade, Alice is bipolar (Okay, show of hands. How many out there?). In her manic moments both before and after she meets Danny, she flies into sexual abandon, and she certainly goes to her grave with a well-notched lipstick case. But “sex was a horse, love was a unicorn,” Alice remembers. And what happens if Alice stops believing in the unicorn? Can shedding delusions go too far? Stripped of all delusion, love, Baker seems to say, is “a nude Barbie doll... kept company by a legless Ken.”

Love and Other Delusions is slim, about 60,000 words. The chapters are short and easy to read, even though the story is told chrono-illogically, the way Alice tells it to Kathy. Baker’s handling of time and revelation of his novel’s surprises are impressive, and for me, there were quite a few Damn-that’s-good! passages. Here’s one:

"The past began fading. Alice would search back through time trying to preserve any, just any, memory of her and Danny together, but each memory became a double-exposed piece of film, the new Danny's image imposed over the old. Their entire past altered by the present, all memories poisoned by the present, a future destroyed by the present."

In places, Baker dips into a haunting magic realism, as when Alice and Kathy visit the plaza in St. Augustine (the city of two of Baker’s previous novels). But mostly this is an interior story with many conversations, minimal settings, memories, relationships, self, and dream. Society is scrim. And it works.

For Baker, “lies” are sometimes deceptions, sometimes self delusions, sometimes legerdemain, sometimes a movie. In the end, he leaves me feeling as if I am at Danny’s movie house. In between shows of a double feature. The first was a love story....

[Nick Stika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fascinating story by Iowa City's own Larry Baker. He has this way of transporting you to different worlds and really sets a wonderful mood. His atmospherics and descriptions are so complete, you feel like you are there. Looking forward to the next one.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something about the stylistic rhythm reminds me of a song with the soft beginnings, pounding beats, rising, building and ebbing slightly, while floating before the dramatic ending...or is it a soft fade out? Somewhere along the way I forgot I was reading fiction and slipped into a voyeuristic delusion. I was spying on these peoples lives, becoming absorbed and realizing just how possible something, which seems implausible, can be acceptable. Each character is faulted for their shortcomings, but created in such a manner that is humanizing, rather than victimizing, and by doing so, makes it that more tragic. Or is it? The story will make you think about relationships, the complexity and what we get from each one we maintain over a life-time. What are these people to us and even though we share moments, our memories and value will greatly vary. Love and Other Delusions is an enlightening read and perfect for a summer escape.

[Kathryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've had high hopes for Larry Baker ever since I read his first book, Flamingo Rising. He has not lived up to my expectations but I will give him one more chance (since I already have his fourth book on my Kindle). In Love and Other Delusions, he revisits faintly familiar scenes -- an old St. Augustine movie theater scheduled for demolition -- but his characters are just too strange for me. A married female college professor initiates a long-term affair with a student who is twelve years younger. She attempts, perhaps, to come to terms with this twenty-year digression years later when she is facing death.

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Love and Other Delusions is like slipping into a dreamlike cinematic experience, the romantic kind of movie-watching where the heavy curtains are pulled back dramatically to reveal a story that grabs hold of you and doesn't let go until it's over. Then the lights come up, and you sit there in a daze a little bit, looking around, regaining your bearings, and processing everything before you are ready to walk away from it. The momentum of this book is admirable, as are the many ways Baker draws on cinematography to frame the narrative.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out our review here:
http://simplepleasuresbooks.wordpress...

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a link to my review of "Love and Other Delusions": http://jchariscarlson.blogspot.com/20...