Love and Death on Long Island: A Novel

by Gilbert Adair

A reserved British intellectual falls obsessively in love with a young American heartthrob, in this witty and poignant "tour de force" ( Literary Review ).

When he wanders into the wrong theater and finds himself watching the wretched teen-pic Hotpants College II, cerebral British author Giles De'Ath becomes romantically obsessed with dreamboat Ronnie Bostock. Giles' infatuation drives him to the He reads American fan magazines and watches movies with titles like Tex Mex and Skid Marks. And finally, he travels to Long Island, intent on meeting Ronnie in the flesh.

The basis for the hit independent film starring Jason Priestley and John Hurt, Love and Death on Long Island is a brilliant and heartrending update of Thomas Mann's early 20th-century novella Death in Venice. It offers both a poignant meditation on passion, and "a very funny portrait of an extraordinarily unworldly academic's introduction to the dizzyingly incomprehensible realm of popular culture" (Nick Hornby).

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, 20th Century, Novels, British Literature, Gay

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.

In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is misleading for this brief book boasting another of Adair's pompous English writers getting into hilarious, idiotic mischief that ultimately ends in catastrophe.

In this novel the writer behaves like a smitten teenage girl and goes in search of his fanboy crush: a handsome teen-idol actor he encounters in a sleazy frat-house movie.

Bizarre, compelling and contains the longest sentences you're likely to find in contemporary lit.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair centres on the development of an obsession that in many respects greatly resembles Death in Venice (which I only read for the first time earlier this year). There’s no doubt that the allusions to Thomas Mann’s classic text are quite deliberate.

Like Death in Venice, the story concerns an aging, widowed and renowned ‘high art’ British novelist/academic with classical tastes who is somewhat out of step with the modern world. By a chance of fate, he encounters the figure of a C-Grade teen Hollywood heartthrob. Instantly enraptured by the ‘innocent’ beauty of the lad, and quickly becomes obsessed with the young actor. The concepts that have driven our narrator's life - logic and reason - are ultimately set against a concept that he has up to this point only ever really known in a philosophical sense: passion.

The drama derives from the act and consequence of an individual driven to enter a world utterly foreign to him – trips to the cinema ( Hotpants College II), snipping out photographs of teenybopper magazines, the world of video rentals (Skid Marks and Tex-Mex completing the oeuvre of interest). The infatuation eventually compels a trip to the US to engender an improbable meeting. Like the trip to Venice in Mann's book, the obsession with a love that can never be fulfilled means that the trip is essentially one of destruction.

This might seem a farce, but the book is nothing of the sort. Beautifully and convincingly constructed, the story constantly drives towards a conclusion that can only end appallingly for all concerned. The desire of a young mediocre American actor baffles our protagonist, but the compulsion to be entwined with a source of something inherently desirable – beauty, youth, lost time, a new world – utterly entrances him.

What I love most about it is the gentleness in how it recognises that when our lives change, they do not always change for reasons that we understand or can control. Despite us knowing from the very start how this story will (must) end, the journey is worth it. Overall, it is an incredibly thoughtful, touching, and really very moving novel, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Gentrification of a Void (or The De'Ath of the Future)

Giles de'Ath, a pompous Pre-Post-Modern writer of tortuous, inadvertently Oulipian Fiction, Art History and Philosophy, unfamiliar with the layout of new-fangled multiplex cinemas, finds himself watching a teen-flick rather than the desired E.M. Forster costume drama.

A widower, he nevertheless falls in love with one of the male bit part actors, after which his life spirals from Cambridge to "Hotpants College III", from faux-European sophistication to Hollywood artlessness, from "Tod in Venedig" to "Ronnie Bostock in Long Island", via such byzantine linguistic and narrative connivances, contrivances, distractions and devices as "the indisputable nimbus of rarefaction", "the tyranny of the subject", "febrile eclecticism", "lumpen pleasure palaces", ephebes, asphodels, eglantines, fanzines, homoerotic porn, a trans-Atlantic flight, meeting Ronnie in person, a rival called Audrey, a short order cook named Irving and a daily diet of cheeseburgers, a true panoply of Post-Modernist temptations and delights.

Even so, apart from the real life (but regrettably now deceased) author, there's nothing and nobody you want to identify with, but you find yourself accompanying the characters on a witty, knowing and well-crafted roller-coaster ride in which audience and cast are intent on destroying each other. Funny, that.

The letters “j” and “q” have been lipogrammatically omitted from this review.


Review of "The Death of the Author"

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Giles de'Ath is referred to as a disciple of Professor Leo Sfax in "The Death of the Author".

[Makis Dionis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Η ματαιοδοξία του έρωτα και της πόζας
Δύο εθισμοι που ξεφτιλιζουν το εγώ, για το εγώ

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Exquisite.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch1qo...

[Sharon Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued to read this modern take on Death in Venice, but, for me, it falls far short of the original.

Giles De'Ath (well, really...) is a successful, if somewhat obscurely academic, novelist and art historian. An inheritance has left him comfortably off, resulting in a relative lack of drive and therefore less output than he might have achieved had he been forced to make a living. Recently widowed, he is a semi-recluse, happily detached from the modern world. So happily detached, in fact, that he unwittingly chooses the wrong cinema (it's a two-screen complex) when sheltering from a sudden downpour. Instead of the screen adaptation of a Forster novel he'd been expecting, he finds himself watching a teen-flick called Hotpants College II.

Realising he has made some sort of mistake, he leaves - but not before noticing the pleasing appearance of a minor character, played by one Ronnie Bostock. Over the next few days, he becomes more and more obsessed with the youth, visiting newsagencies selling movie-gossip magazines featuring Ronnie. This obsession takes over his life, eventually leading him to travel to Long Island and the suburb of Chesterfield, where, he has discovered, Ronnie Bostock lives.

Ronnie is engaged to his girlfriend, Audrey Lynn. Giles actually finds her address in the local phone book and waits outside her house until she appears, after which he follows her into the local shopping precinct and, after pretending to crash into her with his trolley and apologising profusely, he engages her in conversation. Claiming a godchild who is a fan of Ronnie, he wonders if he could meet Ronnie and obtain a signed photograph for her. This leads to dinner, at which he makes a favourable impression by flattering Ronnie and offering to write a screenplay to show off his real talents. Unfortunately, the shooting schedule of Ronnie's next picture has been brought forward due to an imminent writers' strike and he and Audrey have to fly out to Hollywood in a few days and will be married there.

In a panic, Giles manages to get Ronnie to meet him alone, in Irving's diner...but of course it all goes pear-shaped.

I get that this is a kind of absurdist take on the breakdown of a celebrated and sophisticated man in the throes of an unexpected homosexual passion, but even the absurdity failed to engage me. Both protagonists were too unsympathetic and Ronnie far too lightly drawn. Giles is an intellectual and cultural snob, who seems to hold his nose in the company of others; Ronnie barely registers. In addition to the poverty of the characters, the writing style drove me up the wall. Gilbert Adair writes in parenthesis: starting to make one point, he drags in a stack of others, making it hard to follow his sentences. Doubtless this is meant to convey Giles's personality - pernickety, fault-finding, endlessly qualifying the most casual observations - but I found it irritating in the extreme. In short, only three stars from me.

[Mind the Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

Litterär lyckokänsla. I en intervju hörde jag John Hurt berätta om sin besvikelse över att den här filmatiseringen förblev så underskattad. Då var det ändå en 90-talsfilm med Jason Priestley i en av rollerna, utöver vår käre John. Härmed Mind the Book-välsignas både boken och filmen.

Bestämde mig för att leta upp romanen först och blev förvånad över att miljön var ett höstregnigt Hampstead, London. Tweedklädd änkling tillika författare av obskyr sakprosa - som säljer bra i Frankrike - överraskas av en skur och tar skydd under taket framför en biograf. Några stillbilder lockar honom att gå in och köpa en biljett till matinéföreställningen, men han blir visad till fel salong* och får se en annan, helt banal rulle. En av karaktärerna fångar hans intresse, minst sagt... Sade jag att tweedmannen heter Humbert Giles De'Ath [...in Venice].

En annan oväntad faktor är de komiska inslagen i både boken och filmen, t.ex. hamburgerhaket Chez d'Irv, men också ännu mer oväntad situationskomik. John Hurt som nybliven libidinös fanboy kliver in i en butik och säger: - I'm interested in aquiring a video player. - These are microwaves, Sir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjdAJ...

* Delar denna traumatiska upplevelse: Saw III istället för The Devil Wears Prada i Hammersmith.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This re-writing of Thomas Mann's classic of homoerotic Sehnsucht, Death in Venice, has what the source material is sorely lacking: humour and wit. Although Mann's novella has irony in spades (as does Adair's), it's just not the same as humour. Love and Death on Long Island is an imminently enjoyable and rewarding read.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. The story, the writing and the pace of it really impressed me. The only reason it took me a few days to read was because I am in the middle of studying for exams ! I want to read more of this author's work... I might even watch the movie of this!

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this novel not long after it came originally in 1990 (long before the 1998 film version more of which in my footnote *1 below) and haven't reread it since but three stars is probably the rating I would have given it back then and it does reflect the problems I had, back then, with the novel. Adair is a good writer, perhaps too good, but not a very good novelist. I think Adair's problem was that he was too clever-by-half and knew it. Being intellectually clever is fine for a writer, particularly in the French-intellectual-commentator way, but not when it comes to telling a story. I know that good novels are more than good stories but they are also more than displays of infra-dig intellectual puns and mannered aphorisms. The other problem is that Adair isn't French and what in Cocteau, Barthes or Foucault can be brilliantly penetrating when it crosses 'La Manche' (what the French call the English Channel) just sounds ersatz.

Adair was clearly channeling the brothers Mann when writing 'Love and Death on Long Island'; Thomas's 'Death in Venice' but more importantly Heinrich's 'Professor Unrat' (the source material for 'The Blue Angel'). Giles De'ath has much more in common with Professor Rath than Aschenbach though Adair himself had a bee-in-his-bonnet with 'Death in Venice' (see my review of Adair's 'The Real Tadzio').

My central problem with the novel was Giles De'Ath (the surname is a perfect example of Adair's 'clever' but really clunky satirical foreshadowing) is that I found him totally unbelievable. John Hurt was believable in the film but that was the prototecnics of acting technique. There is no equivalent in Adair's prose.

It is never clear whether Giles De'Ath has late in life discovered latent homo-erotic tastes after years of heterosexuality or has simply discovered desire after a lifetime of a-sexuality. While it is easy for many people to see the middle aged and elderly as non-sexual it is much harder to believe that when you strip away forty years that they still had no sexual feelings. No one is born middle aged, not even in the era when most people looked middle aged and dressed as middle aged from their mid-twenties. That doesn't mean that people haven't and don't repress their sexual urges, but the writer has to make them believable. Adair writes Giles as a late middle aged man who sees a pretty young man and falls in love, but he doesn't make him believable.

This is probably because Adair doesn't want Giles seen as homosexual and he doesn't want his infatuation with 'Ronnie Bostock' (the character Jason Priestley played in the film) to be seen as sexual. He presents it as a first-love infatuation in which sex is not simply unacknowledged but actually denied. For me this is untenable. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all of our first loves, no matter how much execrable romantic poetry they caused us to write or the hours we spent obsessing over the minutiae of unsaid words and half glances, were all firmly anchored in raging hormones. You don't escape your body at 13, never mind 53.

Many of the problems of sex in LaDoLI are wrapped up in Adair's attitude to his own sexuality. Adair always said he didn't want to be 'categorised' as a 'gay' novelist which I can respect and sympathise with but most of his novels were published long after 'gay' writing and publishing, even in the UK, had ceased being niche and gone mainstream. There is something evasive in the way Adair dealt with being gay/queer/homosexual up until the time of his death (2012) and it affected his fiction writing in which there are 'gay' characters but the issue is always ostentatiously avoided, elided, sidestepped. I cannot help comparing the way Adair refuses to deal with gay/queer/homosexual characters and an Irish writer like Micheal O Conghaile writing in the 1990s like Adair but in Gaelic and living in the Gaeltacht (see my review of his short story collection 'The Colours of Man').

I am not complaining that Adair is not a campaigning 'gay' author but he writes like he should be. He is obsessed with being gay/queer/homosexual even when he isn't writing about it. Compared to O Conghaile he is trapped in another era which he never comes to grips with or outgrows.

*1 regarding the film version of 'Love and Death on Long Island'. Jason Priestley is grossly over age for the role, he was too old when he rose to fame as 'teen' idol, like most actors in American 'teen' series. But John Hurt is splendid, probably too splendid. Putting a thoroughbred like Hurt, no matter how old, up against a, lightweight is the nicest word I can think of, is bound to fail. I contrast it with the brilliant casting of Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce in 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert' were each in their different way was as strong as each other.

[Spiderorchid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never thought I'd actually write this about a book, but...

Watch the movie, it's better.

There. Shocked? ;)

This isn't a bad book. Adair was a good writer and "Love and Death on Long Island" is well-written and a very amusing variation on Thomas Mann's famous "Tod in Venedig" (higly recommended by the way: not much is actually happening but it's stylistically amazing). But, the characters are a bit flat at times and I found Adair's style uneven. At times I wondered if he actually disliked his protagonist.

The movie is faithful to the book (Adair was one of the writers for the script), but they managed to make the characters more rounded and alive and the ending is more satisfying. The first-class cast also helped.

So, I'll stop now before this turns into a movie-review. It's an interesting book with some flaws. You haven't missed world-class literature if you skip the book and watch the film instead.

[Ronald Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting study of an obsession that develops for a middle aged widowed British writer for a teen screen actor, even to the point where he goes to America to insert himself into the life of the actor. Was a perfect set up for a thriller ending (which would have earned it 5 stars) but the ending was a little weak after all the build up. Still was a very satisfying read.

[Darcie K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. I miss reading prose like this. Travelling down the road of the character's obsession while surrounded by the comfortable bleakness of his solitude was an intense way to spend the 90 minutes it took to read this book.

[China · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used to watch the movie version of this as a teenager, and having now read the original, I appreciate John Hurt's performance all the more. This is exactly as concise as it needs to be and is a fantastic account of obsession that one can only hope they don't identify with.

[Andrew Gulakov · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's never too late to love, but some times your love can be late ))

[Jigar Brahmbhatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing, the movie equally so.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a dazzling performance. One of the funniest, most original, most insightful, most poignant books I've ever read.

[Eduardo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Saw the movie too. Queer, Horse Crazy cover the same territory. Man obsessed with boy. Ok, young man. This one felt “postmodern” with its unreliable unreliable narrator. He’s doubly unreliable. I mean there’s a mocking tone to his persona, as though the author is mocking himself or a type, say Gore Vidal. I dunno. I do want to read his Holy Innocents.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of like a long Nabokov impression, but a good story well told all the same.

[Matheus · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And because he would not destroy it, it would end by utterly destroying him."

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good film, very good book.

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can’t quite describe what I find so off putting about this book. I started reading it knowing nothing about it, and didn’t pick up on the plot line u til about a third of the way through, where I then was not the biggest fan of Giles.

I’m not mad that I read this book, but I would never read it again and would never recommend it to anyone unless it’s 3am and you have literally nothing better to do with your time.

[David Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, bizarre, clever, and slightly challenging (I can't remember the last time I had to look up this many words in the dictionary!). The story of Giles De'Ath, a successful British writer/intellectual, independently wealthy, snobbish, recently widowed and completely detached from modern life. One day during a downpour he stumbles into a movie theater (where he has barely ever been) and comes upon "Hotpants College 2" and falls in love with Ronnie Bostock, an up and coming heart throb in a minor role. The movie and the actor, his need to begin to understand modernity, fandom and worship and his budding sexuality, all of this throws his life into turnaround. Beautiful, though sometimes inaccessibly, written, surprising and really well done.
I saw the wonderful movie version with John Hurt and Jason Priestly in the late 90s.

[Samuel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Antiquarisch besorgt, Adair wird momentan scheinbar nicht mehr verlegt. Bei dem Buch vielleicht sogar mit Recht.
Professor verliebt sich in jungen (heterosexuellen) B-Schauspieler, stellt ihm nach – aber es endet natürlich ohne jeden Erfolg. Er bricht sich einen ab, um den Misserfolg als Erfolg darzustellen.

Arg schwülstig letztendlich alles und im Grunde nichts anderes als eine eng angelegte Variation von „Tod in Venedig“. Personal und Stimmung sind nahezu deckungsgleich, das Schmachten wird hier nicht so schön ausgedrückt wie bei Mann.