A Pretentious Yet Fluffy Beach Book

Spring break provides Harvard students with an escape from the intense intellectual grind of mid-terms. Talk is not of books but of beer, and when books are discussed they tend to be fat paperbacks with lurid covers more easily found in the local supermarket than any Harvard library.

Author Josephine Hart would like to provide a piece of literature worthy of Widener. But Damage, her novel of sex and death, remains little more than a fluffy book suitable only for beach reading. Ultimately Hart provides neither the intellectual interest of a Faulkner novel nor the enjoyable anti-intellectual style of Danielle Steele's works.

Damage is the story of one man's obsession that eventually destroys his family and his life. The main character, who remains unnamed, is a respectable English doctor and politician, ostensibly a good father and husband. His bourgeois bliss comes to an abrupt end when Anna Barton, the fiancee of his son Martyn, enters our hero's life.

As he says, "The shock of recognition had passed through my body like a powerful current. Just for a moment I had met my sort, another of my species." The species connection is so strong that the father and the fiancee begin an affair that lasts until the night before Anna's wedding to Martyn. Their romantic liason ends when Martyn discovers them in mid-bondage and jumps to his death on the marble floor of the lobby of Anna's apartment building.

This episode leads to the dissolution of the narrator's life. Both Anna and his wife Ingrid leave him, his political career is ruined, and he eventually retires to live in the isolation of a small apartment with no company except for two blown-up color photographs--one of Martyn and one of Anna.

Why these characters act with such reckless abandon is only vaguely explained by Hart. Anna's childhood was marred by the suicide of a brother who could not live knowing that she would see other men. She tries to deal with her grief by having affairs with various men, among them Martyn and his father.

The narrator has no such trauma in his past. In fact, he has never confronted any kind of adversity--he is emotionless, and Anna is the only thing that can make him feel alive. Unfortunately, these reasons never seem to convince the reader of the two characters' need for the affair nor of their passion.

Hart's stilted prose style, in its attempt to create a sensual yet literary story, kills all the emotion that this potentially erotic plot could have elicited. Hart tries frantically to use as many adjectives as possible and ends up with amateurish Dickensian overkill--the story and characters are utterly unbelievable.

Something as insignificant as a room-service lunch receives the detailed description usually reserved for items that actually have some importance to the story. "Pale honey slices of chicken, in an amber-coloured sauce; a salad of whitened green that gleamed; creamy-coloured cheese; the deep red of port; colours so intense and shades so subtle. I slipped softly into the world of the senses. A body that could stretch out fully to imprison, release, restrain or devour its prey, could now also eat food the way food should be eaten."

The dialogue in this book is equally unconvincing and maintains the one-dimensionality of the characters. Redundancy is a major problem in their speeches, particularly in the more emotional moments of the book.

For example, in the climactic argument between Ingrid and her husband over the untimely demise of their son, he says: "Ingrid, listen to me. Martyn is dead. He is gone for ever. For ever. His life is over. Listen to me, Ingrid. Listen to me. I brought this death into being... Let it slip towards me, Ingrid. Push it towards me, push his death towards me. Breathe deeply, Ingrid, breathe deeply. You will live after this. Push Martyn's death towards me. You will live. Give him to me now. Give me his death." Why the narrator believes that this request will alleviate his wife's sorrow remains as much a mystery as the motivations behind most of the other characters' actions in the book.

Damage has a plot worthy of the best Harlequin romances, but Hart diminishes its effectiveness on this base level by striving to create prose that is so stylized it appears amusing. Her writing is so laden with excessive verbiage that, in the end, the author's style, rather than plot or characterization, dominates the book. In another author, that dominance might not spell disaster, but the only response that Hart's prose provokes is laughter.