The God of Nightmares by Paula Fox

During the months I lived in New Orleans, I loved more people than I had ever loved in my life. I drowned in waters of love. My heart beat strongly in anticipation of seeing them. I never wearied of their faces, their voices.

Helen lives with her mother in upstate New York, in the long shadow of her father's abandonment. When word comes that her father has finally died, her mother's tenuous hopes of reunion are shattered, and the life that they've been living together suddenly seems dreary and intolerable. Her mother sends Helen to New Orleans to find her sister, Helen's aunt, who, like Helen's mother, was once a glamorous cabaret girl. Ostensibly, Helen is sent to ask Aunt Lulu to return to New York and help manage their humble inn, but as soon as she sees Lulu in the flesh--drunk and nude, cantankerous, living in a converted old ballroom where the ceiling is plastered with stars--she understands that her mother has really sent her to free her, to show her other ways she might live. And sure enough, she finds in New Orleans a new community with whom she falls deeply in love: bohemians, poets, and queers.

Among them are Len, an enigmatic and silver-haired young man whom she falls for, and Nina, a fellow northern emigre, whom she falls for equally intensely, but in a different way. Among these Helen navigates the changing world of the American South in the 1940's: in Europe, the specter of the Nazis is looming, and here in New Orleans the old orthodoxies of race and gender fight jealously for preservation. Claude, the beautiful scion of a wealthy family, faces the threat of vengeance by the local mafia who resent Claude's attentions to one of their own young scions. Her poet friend, Gerald, suffers a lifelong injury inflicted by the very rural swamp-dwellers who form, to their great chagrin, the core of his poems. Helen, out of her stony northern element, treats these conflicts as challenges to be navigated. It's Nina, on the other hand, who shows up at the department store where Helen works and impulsively drinks from the Colored water fountain, inviting the attention and ire of witnesses. It's this boldness that both attracts and terrifies Helen.

I loved Fox's novel Desperate Characters, which takes place over a couple of days in Brooklyn, and has a kind of Sparkian slightness that you know I'm into. The God of Nightmares, with its larger cast, richer backdrop, and wider temporal scope, is a different kind of book entirely, and yet it has something of the same slightness, two qualities which I thought were rather at odds with one another. The novel evokes New Orleans less effectively, I found, than it does the spartan Hudson Valley of Helen's childhood. But the central triangle of Helen-Len-Nina is an effective and fascinating one, with Helen's aunt as a kind of star around which these planets orbit. The most interesting part, I thought, was actually the novel's slim "Part Two," which sees Helen, married to Len and living in New York, reencountering Nina for the first time in decades--only to understand for the first time that Nina and Len had had a brief affair all those years ago. That moment, where a whole history is upended by the slight turn of revelation, reminded me most of Desperate Characters.