In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The Point had a double meaning: it was both the point of human life--its goal--and also the point of intersection where its highest attainment, by which he meant its highest experiences, met. And what were these highest experiences? They were two-fold, he explained: one  on the physical plane, the other on the--what do you want to call it? The psychic, the spiritual? Whatever. 'Now what would you call the highest human experience on the physical plane?' he asked his audience on these Saturday nights in the sunken garden. No answer, a hushed stillness except for the incessant splash from the fountain, and the insects shrieking (sometimes a bird woke up and sang by mistake from the depths of some dark tree). 'What, no one knows? You don't even know that? What have I done to deserve this bunch of dummies?' And then he supplied the answer himself: 'The Orgasm, of course--isn't that it? Isn't that the Point of our highest physical experience?' It was, there was no question of it. Yes, Socrates.

Many years ago, Leo Kellerman enter Louise's world like an Adonis. Blonde, striking, and large, he managed to take possession both of Louise's apartment, occupied by her husband Bruno and daughter Marietta, as well as Louise herself. It's from Louise's apartment he began to court followers to his programs of physical and spiritual development. And though neither the sex nor the residency was permanent, Louise has had a kind of hopelessly entangled relationship with Leo all her life, up into old age. In the New York of the 80s, Leo has graduated to a run-down Victorian mansion in the Hudson Valley, where he runs what looks and sounds awfully like a cult. His charisma attracts the young--and young women especially--but those who have known him long can see how fat he's gotten, how shabby, and how desperate.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's In Search of Love and Beauty is, on a structural level, something to be admired. The way she interweaves the now and then, providing a holistic sense of Leo and Louise's lives. To these several generations of family are added: Louise's needy, insecure daughter Marietta; Marietta's son Mark, suave, cold, and gay; Natasha, an adopted daughter whose physical ugliness and shy devotion to Mark conceal the fact that, of all the characters, she's the only one who seems rather at peace. (She is the only one, it seems, on whom Leo's vulgar charms have no effect, because she lacks the the tremendous interior longings on which he preys.) Leo, of course, has no family; Louise is "as close to a wife" as he's ever desired, and it's hard not to feel that he has, in some way, parasitized them. But none of them are really fools; they more than anyone see Leo for what he is, and there is a sense that they attend to him--Mark helps finance that run-down Victorian, for example--out of pity as much as awe. It's a vision of the New Age in the 80s that has curdled, but which insists it's always been in on the joke.

One thing that really interested me in In Search of Love and Beauty was the characters' relationship to India. Jhabvala of course, was born Ruth Prawer in Germany, and married a Persian architect in New Delhi. Many of her books are about India, and she's perhaps best remembered today for her work with the Anglo-Indian Merchant and Ivory filmmaking team, including an adaptation of her India-set novel Heat and Dust. In Search of Love and Beauty is a New York novel, but it's a New York tinged by India: Leo's self-help work is pointedly influenced by Indian mysticism; Marietta goes to India yearly, to travel and be with an Indian named Ahmed with whom she carries on a decades-long affair. She learns to play the sarod, which makes In Search of Love and Beauty, somehow, the second book I've read this year in which a woman learns to play the sarod. Jhabvala's interested in the way that India becomes a focus for the Western imagination, a place whose wisdom we imagine we might turn to when our own has become exhausted. In one crucial scene, Marietta sees that Ahmed has aged terribly after a long absence, revealing, perhaps, that Eastern mysticism can't really keep us shielded from the bare facts of human nature.

In Search of Love and Beauty struck me as one of those books you might call a "real yarn," a story whose chief appeal is a plotty intricacy that keeps you engaged. It's often very funny, as with the section above, where Leo posits to his followers that the point of life is to seek a spiritual orgasm. It's written in an omniscient third person that makes it seem sort of antiquated--an 1880s voice for the 1980s. Its chief flaw might be that Leo, the novel's lodestar, never quite seems as magnetic or appealing as the story demands; his pathetic and rather ordinary nature are clear to us from the very beginning. But maybe that's the point--we even flock to gurus we don't believe in, because unlike us, at least they seem to believe in themselves.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I try to find an explanation for him. I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life. This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything--motor cars, refrigerators--come here to such a place where there is nothing?

Heat and Dust is the story of Olivia, the wife of a young English administrator during the Raj, who leaves her husband for the charismatic Nawab, a minor prince. This momentous act serves as the book's climax, but it's explained at the very beginning, so this is one of those books who makes the reader ask the question, How did we get here? For Olivia, her personal motivations intersect with the great forces that push and pull between the British and their Indian subjects. The Nawab is very charming and magnetic, though flighty: he lives with another young British man whose ardor for the Nawab approaches, or simply is, homosexual obsession, and he charms Olivia, too. In fact, the Nawab--powerful but jealous of the more powerful English, sneaky, needy, selfish--is the book's most interesting character; he seduces us, too, though we might flatter ourselves that we have better judgment than Olivia.

But Olivia, too, sees in the Nawab an escape from the stolid, condescending British empire, whose worst qualities soon become apparent in her apparatchik husband, Douglas. As Douglas and the other colonials talk smugly about the Indians as if they were unruly children, Olivia finds herself identifying with the Nawab's rebellious and, to her, exotic spirit. Their first dalliance occurs at a shrine famous for its association with suttees, wives who ritually throw themselves on their husband's funeral parlors. At a party, Olivia unnerves everyone by insisting she would commit this most romantic of acts for Douglas, but soon it becomes clear to her that Douglas neither wants nor deserves this. Yet perhaps the Nawab, and India, are worthy of that kind of passion, which the British have meticulously repressed.

Olivia's story is told by her step-granddaughter who, fifty years after Olivia abandoned her husband, has gone to India to understand why she did what she did. She arrives in a 1970's India that is quite different from Olivia's time; the British have left, and the Nawab's palace is in ruins, as are the palaces of many minor princes who were essentially propped up by the British regime. Westerners no longer come to India for their political ambitions but, like the American Buddhist sage she begins sleeping with, spiritual ones. Somehow, even though the context has changed completely, she finds herself retracing Olivia's steps almost exactly, becoming pregnant--not by a prince but by her landlord--and heading up into the mountains to have her child. Prawer Jhabvala seems to suggest that, even as the world changes, the anxious interdependence of the Western World and India persists, both beguiling and repelling those whites who long for something they believe India can provide.

Heat and Dust has an obvious analog in A Passage to India, but it also reminded me quite a bit of W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil, a novel set not in India but in Hong Kong, but whose central character--the wife of a diplomat whose exposure to a foreign culture transforms her--is much like Olivia. I didn't know until reading this that Prawer Jhabvala was not Indian--she took her husband's last name--but I also didn't know that she was a vital third partner in Merchant-Ivory Productions, and wrote nearly all of the director-producer's novels for decades and decades. Heat and Dust, which became a Merchant-Ivory movie in the 1980's, fits really neatly within that universe.