Cover

Titel

Introduction

Introduction

Christopher Coe, whose death from AIDS in 1994 robbed us of a visionary American writer, published only two novels. The second of these, Such Times, is a lyrical dirge, a paean to life written in the valley of the shadow of death. Its predecessor, I Look Divine, is funnier, leaner, more nimble, if no less dark and majestic. At its center stands Nicholas, the narrator’s younger brother, a man “with an instinct for placing himself in a frame.” Nicholas’s narcissism is, to borrow a term from Henry James, the donnée of I Look Divine, the spark by which its wit and its tenderness are ignited. Impossibly wealthy, impossibly smart, and possessed of the finest cheekbones in Christendom, Nicholas parades through the novel throwing off insouciant remarks and admiring himself in mirrors. (“You are the smartest little boy in the world, and you also look like this,” he tells one of these.) Yet he is also committing a suicide as “long and lovely” as any since Oscar Wilde coined the phrase. It is the course of these parallel trajectories—and their eventual confluence—that the novel charts.

The plot of I Look Divine, to the extent that it has one, is modest. Nicholas has died, and his brother has come to New York to survey his effects. Among these is a photograph of Nicholas in a black Japanese robe, standing against “a wall of skull-like faces carved in stone. His pose includes a cigarette, white filtered, and a hollow-stemmed champagne glass that he is holding to his neck, just below the jawline.” Not surprisingly, the photograph has a mirrored frame—and indeed, one might say that I Look Divine is the mirrored frame within which Coe positions Nicholas. Where the narrator—and the reader—catch glimpses of themselves is in the reflective edging.

A genius of self-regard with a penchant for self-destruction, Nicholas commands his brother’s awe and his ire, his passion and his compassion. Though his preferred milieu is the hotel bar—in Madrid, in Rome, at various Mexican resorts—it is when he stumbles into environments where he finds himself at a disadvantage that he comes most gloriously into his own. Indeed, Nicholas’s strategies for making himself feel at home (which entail making others feel uneasy) provide Coe with some of his best opportunities for comedy, in particular when he is sending up, through the effete Nicholas, the hypermasculine posturing that was such a feature of gay life in New York in the nineteen-seventies. Hence we get this hilarious description of a Roman gay disco:

The one wall not covered by mirrors was covered instead by a mural of opulently muscled, overgendered men, half or more undressed. The illustrator must have tried to capture how men might look if they could issue directly from each other in a womanless world, and in the mural the lewdly virile specimens, cartoon ideals, regarded each other with untender admiration.