even to most teenagers, we have much less patience for [Paul] Zweig's kind of sublime swooning: "She lived for that grateful gulp at the bottom of her flesh; and I adored her." What is more striking is the way Zweig's fascination with sex seems to grant him no access at all to the inwardness of his partners. Arlette, Claire, and Michele have no real life on the page; they are stylish, seductive abstractions, more like figures in an Antonioni movie than like characters in a novel, or people one might know in real life. "You were there, Arlette, in all your forbidding deliberation, like a nun," he writes, with the kind of rhetorical flourish that seems more natural in French than in English. "I could see you clearly unbuttoning your plaid dress and folding it on the chair in my room; I could see you unhook your brassiere, like Jeanne d'Arc preparing for the flames."from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Remembered
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