The Review of Contemporary Fiction

My Big Apartment and A Cleaning Woman, by Christian Oster
reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Christian Oster. My Big Apartment. Trans. and intro. Jordan Stump. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002. 155 pp. Paper: $20.00; A Cleaning Woman. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Other Press, 2003. 197 pp. $22.00.

Since Preston Sturges, the American romantic comedy—with its anatomy of the sweet disorder of infatuation as it stumbles into love, its slight plots compelled nevertheless by the engine of heavy-handed complications, all set against the chaotic rule of coincidence—has been largely the province of film, disdained by contemporary serious fiction makers as too frivolous to reward extensive investigation, save as the subject of often withering parody. Too bad, really, as Christian Oster’s marvelous entertainments testify—ultimately, sentimentality is merely the tension of aware minds burdened/salvaged by hearts that stubbornly refuse to accept the irony of their own evident vulnerability. Romantic comedy has always lingered dangerously close to existential despair: a slight turn of the plot, and the screen could darken into irretrievable sorrow. Oster understands that—his central characters are seekers: tender, intellectual men who linger against adulthood, who fear accepting the chilling reality that any life is a structureless drift made endurable only by the accidental collision of two imperfect, yearning hearts. Both hurt and hopeful, his narrators, who speak in unaffected directness rendered perfectly by these translations, move about a thin sort of everyday world, certain that love at first sight is viable, that the heart cannot err, that the rich and cutting disappointment of love is the sole reward for living. In My Big Apartment (1999) a man, bruised by a collapsing relationship with a live-in lover, chances upon a striking but very pregnant woman in a public pool. Impulsively, he agrees to accompany her to her brother’s home in southern France, and there becomes involved with the idea of being involved with her even as he assists in the delivery and becomes hopelessly enthralled by the simple wonder of the newborn girl. By the close, they agree to stay together; perhaps, they reason, it is love enough. Jacques, the suffering romantic of A Cleaning Woman (2001), is also smitten by a stranger, specifically a young woman he hires to restore tidiness to his Paris digs in the aftermath of a careening relationship. Unlike the earlier novel, however, Oster here fleshes out this object of affection and creates a fragile, fascinating sort of love quadrangle as both Jacques and the cleaning woman have hearts haunted by lingering ghosts. Indeed, Oster examines the uneasy line separating passion and obsession. The attraction here is far more erotic, but that never becomes the saving impulse, Oster too aware that the frictions of sexuality are, compared to love, uncomplicated and inevitably dulled. The interest here is in the overwhelming hunger of attraction (Oster nicely manipulates the metaphor of the open sea and drowning) and the sweet risk of giving in to its dark suasion. Never collapsing into thin clichés, Oster stage-manages this romance through point of view, Jacques never entirely aware of all that he reveals: his needful heart, the poignant sadness of his aimless midlife, the intractable excess of his desire, and the insatiable jealousy that lurks, Oster argues, at the heart of every romantic.