For his senior thesis Justin Haythe wrote a novel. It presumably passed muster with his Jamesian professor, but was subsequently considered unworthy of publication. In his debut novel at hand — firmly on the Booker longlist this year — the Jamesian influence remains more than perceptible. In its narrative structure and its geography, in its careful delineation of the American abroad and its fidelity to the aesthetics of observation, The Honeymoon is part of a distinct and extended Henry James revival. Maureen and her young son, Gordon, are Americans who are only at home abroad, and then too never for long. Her itinerant life is dictated by two factors: the art housed in European cities and her financial circumstances of the moment, made always measurably more comfortable by a generous ex-husband and a floating community of friends forever captured by her charm. In an exercise in unflinching and unhurried remembrance, Gordon, now a twentysomething resident of end twentieth century London, reconstructs that life and the price it has extracted from his fleeting marriage to an Englishwoman. Maureen, recalls Gordon, “had a precise idea of the sort of life she wanted. Like some of her favourite painters who travelled the world in pursuit of good light, she envisioned her life in the casual, unlit spaces of the Old World: beneath trees, at riverbanks, reading outdoors in the shade of a canopy.” But, in the most clear Jamesian parallel: “Her great regret was that she had missed by fifty years the time when Europe was still open to Americans — when only the smart and the sensitive came across.” Hence, Maureen was always at work. To distinguish herself from the touristy hordes, she relied upon an intensely felt identification with the great masters, as too easily acquired affectations. She was forever at work on a book that never really ended, Turned Back at the Border: An Art Guide to the Great Cities of Europe. It was an excuse for indulgent self-education and breezy dismissal of any responsibility for her actions. It was also an instinctive way of breaking free of the stifling expectations set by family and society, without any confrontations. It is appropriate then that the final confrontation occurs in a city of fiercely lit spaces, a city so unusual and breathtakingly beautiful that it appears to exist only to entertain and to hold in its islands man’s aesthetic flights. Maureen is treating Gordon and his wife to a delayed honeymoon in Venice, and it is in this most observed of cities that a rather clumsily crafted encounter exposes the pretensions and vanities sustaining their charmed lives. In the Most Serene Republic, their delicately tethered lives are cast violently adrift. The Honeymoon is actually just the perfect justification for longlists for major prizes. It is not a substantial work, its lyricism is marred by abrupt plot changes. But it must be noticed, it announces an uncommon talent.
