Novels only partially satisfy

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and had its general release the last week of November but, as is usually the case, the book is better than the movie. While the film Starting Out in the Evening has received OK reviews, the book was downright fawned over when it came out a few years ago. No doubt to coincide with the movie, the paperback version has recently been published – and it's worth the read, even if Brian Morton's writing loses its brilliance in the latter third of the novel. What's not particularly worth the effort and time, unless you're rather fond of mathematics and English history, is The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt.

The storyline of Starting Out in the Evening is quite simple. The life of Heather Wolfe was forever changed when, at age 16, she read Tenderness by Leonard Schiller: "Tenderness gave her courage; it taught her that she was responsible only for her own life.... It was as if Schiller had explained her life to her more sympathetically than she'd been able to explain it to herself.... For years, the book was one of her closest companions. Once a year or so, she reread it from cover to cover.... She loved to return to the world of the book, a world in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions."

As a graduate student, Heather wants to do her thesis on this novelist who so changed her life and inspired her so much. She arranges to meet him and, when he arrives at the restaurant, she sees him in person for the first time. He comes toward her, smiling: "Old, fat, bald, leaning awkwardly on a cane. The man of her dreams."

Ultimately, it's not his age or looks that disappoint Heather as much as the fact that he has lost the energy and romantic fervor that he had when he was younger and that permeate his first two books, the ones that so influenced Heather. For Schiller's part, he is initially flattered by Heather's attentions, but isn't moved by her worship of him to re-assess his contributions to the world: "Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye."

Schiller's daughter also plays a part in Starting Out in the Evening; his wife having passed away. Ariel, at middle-age, struggles with failed romances and a lack of direction in her life, until she reconnects, by chance, with a former partner, Casey. This is where Starting Out in the Evening starts going badly. The character of Casey, a black intellectual, is horribly written – and once he's introduced into the mix, even Morton's stronger characters begin to utter clichés and the writing becomes uneven. During this part of the book, Schiller is on a subway car, looking at the urban youth riding with him, and he muses that, "He could never write about these lives; they were beyond the reach of his imagination." It's a thought that would have served Morton well when he was first considering Casey – maybe then, Casey would have become more than a stereotype.

The lack of connection to Casey is similar to the feeling one gets with most of the characters in The Indian Clerk, but for different reasons. For Morton, the personality and life of a black intellectual is likely "beyond the reach of his imagination," whereas Leavitt is unable to get close to his subjects because of all the research that lies between him and them. The Indian Clerk is a very well-documented piece of historical fiction, but at the expense of good storytelling.

Based on the true relationship between a highly respected British mathematician, G. H. Hardy, and an obscure, self-taught mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, The Indian Clerk takes place in the early part of the 20th century and features visits from such notable thinkers as John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, while it is interesting to learn more about such influential figures, they don't add much to the narrative and, in fact, bog it down.

For unclear reasons, much of the story is told as a "speech never given" by Hardy at Harvard in 1936, long after Ramanujan has died. The bulk of the novel focuses on the period from 1913 to 1919, when Ramanujan was in England, at the behest of Hardy and his professional partner, J.E. Littlewood. Since we know from the beginning of the book that Ramanujan died young but are not told how until well into it, there is a sense of suspense that builds, only to fizzle when the reason for his death is revealed and it is rather mundane, albeit tragic.

For readers already familiar with Ramanujan's life, this won't be an issue and, perhaps, neither will the number of pages Leavitt dedicates to the mathematical problems being dealt with by Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan. For those who aren't so fascinated by math, Leavitt makes prime numbers as dull as they sound.

Other characters in the novel include Alice Neville, the wife of one of Hardy's junior colleagues, and Hardy's sister, Gertrude. While they are more deeply developed than the main characters, they are still not particularly likable and one doesn't particularly care what happens to them.

But there are bright moments in The Indian Clerk. Leavitt portrays Hardy as a closeted gay man and it is intriguing to read about some of the difficulties of being a homosexual in England at that time. As well, the relationship between the different classes and the beginning of the deterioration of England's Empire are compelling topics, as is the debate about England's entry into the war and its persecution of dissenters. Nonetheless, The Indian Clerk will be too much of a slog for most readers and is not recommended for any but the most ardent lovers of math and history.

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