Just Jennifer

Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow (William Morrow, May 2015)

This sophomore book by the author of Indiscretion follows Wylie Rose and his obsession with Cesca Bonet from the time he falls out of her tree as a pre-teen.  Wylie meets the Bonet children, Cesca, Aurelio, and the twins through their uncle Roger as he is on the cusp of becoming a teenager; he finds himself obsessed with the idea of Cesca and longs for his next chance to see her.  Cesca has ruined Wylie for any other girl, teenager or woman, as he can never quite get her out of his mind.  The bohemian existence the Bonet children live is much different than Wylie’s more traditional, though privileged, upbringing.  Their parents are for the most part estranged, their mother living in New York City, their father an artist in Barcelona.  Whether consciously or not, Wylie befriends Aurelio, an artist giving him more chances to be in Cesca’s aura, but Aurelio is much more serious about both his art and his relationship with Wylie.  Through the 1960’s into the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Wylie continues to obsess over Cesca and grasps at the possibility that they have a future together.  Dubow’s sentences and prose are gorgeous and written with an almost dreamlike quality reflected in the title.  Marriage and relationships are often at the forefront and the only healthy relationship that Wylie is witness to is an older couple, an artist Paolo and his wife Esther, proof that lasting, honest love is possible.  As frustrated as readers may become with Wylie, they will be begin to wonder if we each create our own obsessive cycle from which cannot  be broken at one time or another.  Aurelio is a character readers will ache for and hope he is able to find some peace and his place in the world at long last.  The style of the novel is reminiscent of late 19^th or early 20^th century classics as Wylie, and the reader, are drawn into the glamorous life of the Hamptons and the artists who inhabited the colonies and into the eternal quest to love and to be loved in return.