Crazy Love

by Tom Lennon

55,000 and a 520i with alloy wheels at 28 — that's success. A high-flying executive, to all appearances happily married with a child, goes to extremes of duplicity to hide his homosexuality. When he meets Johnny his carefully constructed life begins to unravel. Crazy Love explores many overlapping worlds -- that of the Celtic Tiger, the upwardly mobile career-man and the subterranean world of gay nightclubs.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just LOVED this book. It started slowly, but once it got going, I couldn't put it down. It is set in Dublin, and tells the story of Paul, a man going through life living a lie. He is married with a child, but underneath it all he knows he is gay. He is successful and financially well off. He thinks he can survive life like this, just going through the motions, until a young man (Johnny) comes for an interview at his workplace and Paul falls 'crazy in love' with him.

It so acurately describes, first, Paul's fascination, then love for Johnny. I loved Paul as a character. He could be so funny at times. Johnny started out as just a pretty boy, but soon proved himself to be much more than that.

Sometimes, a book just grabs me, it may not be great literature, but I just love it totally. The characters, the writing, everything - and this was one of those times.

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There are days that change your life, and this is definitely one of those days. The world has turned a somersault, you feel like you are someone else. Your senses are touching a heightened state. Nothing looks or smells or even tastes the same. You float around like you’re on some sort of hallucinogenic drug. You’ve never felt so alive. A powerful love for the world has gripped you. The evening light falling upon the city has a poetic quality to it, the long line of traffic up ahead has artistic merit, and for the first time since adolescence you feel inspired to attempt a poem. That raw nerve has been touched. This day needs to be perpetuated.”

*

“Before you met him, weeks and months used to glide past without you taking any particular notice, but [n]ow every moment seems highly charged, precious, there to be grasped and lived.”

*

“It’s after you had turned fourteen and fallen in love for that breathtaking first time. Speaking aloud to an imaginary camera, you reminisce on how close you came ot saying something to Eamonn O’Neill. How could you ever foget that name. The pair of you were inseparable, the purest of friendships. You’ve never had a friendship like it since, and something tells you even now that he was as much in love with you as you were with him. Anything that happened, your first thought was of telling him, of watching his animated reaction. And it was just after that fourteenth birthday when his family moved house, away down to the west of Ireland. One hundred and sixty miles away to be precise. The night before he left, the two of you kicked a football around on the road with all the others, the same way you did any summer night. At ten o’clock, with the long twilight turning to darkness, he said goodbye, and before he went into his house, he stood in front of you, neither of you knowing what to do or say. The moment is still so vivid. How were you to know that you would never look into those eyes again? The opportunity slipped by, you didn’t have the words to say. And you went to bed and cried yourself to sleep.”

*

“It’s like a logjam has been cleared and the river is flowing along at the pace it ought to flow at. Your energy is no longer sapped up and wasted by the effort involved in leading that double-life. Now you know that you are finally moving on to wherever it is you are going.”

*

god this book literally kills me. the way Lennon articulates this range of gay emotions is so intense and so profoundly relatable, even to me as someone who hasn’t really been closeted the way Paul is since high school. the second person narration sweeps us into Paul’s obsession and also into the wonder of “every moment [...] highly charged, precious, there to be grasped and lived” and every time I had to put the book down I left it feeling like everything around me was as charged with emotion as the book is.

it is, I feel, natural to compare this with Lennon’s other novel: where When Love Comes to Town is intensely and powerfully validating in its bitterness, Crazy Love is, for all its claustrophobia and stifledness, simultaneously so wonderfully, beautifully open — it is a story about opening, about learning not simply how to love but that you are capable of loving, after so much time both denying love and being denied the very possibility of it. I need When Love Comes to Town as a reminder that I am not alone, and I need Crazy Love to renew my faith that the vertiginous but ambiguous potential at the end of Neil’s story can, in fact, be more than just potential.

[JOSEPH OLIVER · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not very often I can say those famous words ` a real page-turner'. I don't think that I have used those words in any review before actually. But this really is such a book. The time line is quite short - a month possibly - and the intensity of the emotional trauma of Paul Cullen is so well portrayed that you have to get to the next page to learn what is happening - what mess do his lies get him into now. How long can he keep this charade up once the shell has been broken? Not long as it happens but we are carried along by the collapsing mind. I felt very sorry for the man really at the end of the book. And sorry for myself that it was finished. I notice this author abruptly stopped publishing so there are no more to read so maybe that added to the sad end. Read it and prepare for your emotional roller coaster. If nothing else you will get a very vivid description of what it feels like to be intensely in love and the really crazy things it makes you do.

[Gary Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life can be complicated but this books sees you through the obsticales and shines hope :)

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little history first, when this novel was published in 1999 the author still felt it necessary to use a pseudonym because he feared he would lose his teaching post at a secondary school controlled by the Catholic Church (88% of schools in Ireland are still controlled/run by the Catholic Church or Catholic teaching/religious orders but Priests or members of Religious orders have almost disappeared as teachers or principals). I went to school in Dublin, where this novel is set, in the 1970s but left for London at the end of the decade. Paul, the main protagonist in this novel, would have finished school and university at the end of the 1980s but remained and went to work in Ireland of the 1990s 'Celtic Tiger' boom. All of this is to say that there is much that I can relate to in this novel even though it is set at a time when Ireland was changing radically, but it is often difficult to remember, never mind explain to someone now, how glacial the pace of change seemed when you were living through it. At times it seemed change only came in response to tragedies like the homophobic murder of Declan Flynn in 1982 (you really should google it). All this is a prelude to explain that the Ireland of the 'Celtic Tiger' years when a 28 year old executive with all the material trappings of success, married, with a child, could wake one day and find himself hopeless in love with another man no longer exists (Please see my footnote *Gay married men below - it is important but I don't want to prolong this opening digression).

So this is a novel about accepting yourself, about not hiding, not lying and about the damage those things cause you and others - most particularly Paul's wife and the man he falls in love with and allows to fall in love him by concealing his marriage - it is brutally frank and does not in the least conceal or downplay what a self centered, deceitful shite Paul is. His actions drive him to a nervous breakdown and acts of idiocy but has a happy ending which only an author of exceptional talent can make believably satisfactory. Tom Lennon is such an author. He has a wonderful command of language - his descriptions of Paul's falling in love are both lyrical and believable. Indeed Paul's antics as he falls in love for the first time at 28 are beautifully laid out and described, a combination of the comic and absurd as falling in love always is and tragic because he has hidden away and buried this possibility for so long.

I think this is an excellent novel. Times have changed, in some places for the better, in others it seems change is in retreat. But no matter where you live accepting that you are LGBT+ is never straightforward or easy but the cost of lying to yourself and others is worse.

* Gay married men - I nearly didn't read this novel because I have an acute aversion, no a revulsion, for gay men who use women as a way to hide from themselves. I don't want to pretend that back in my teenage years I was 'out & proud' because I was as afraid and closeted as so many others. What I did know was that if anything would break my mother's heart and earn me her contempt it would not be being queer but deceiving someone else - and that is what marriage would have been (though to be honest I can't pretend that I am at all sure I could have found a woman to deceive).