The reckoning

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as “a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards,” the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life. In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley.

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favorite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.