Bart Schneider

FEATURE
Hearts and Times
Bart Schneider's new novel discovers love in a time of culture war.

by EVELYN SHARENOV
243-2122


In his first novel, Blue Bossa, Bart Schneider recounted the tragic, addicted life of jazz musician Chet Baker, setting the scene in San Francisco circa 1974. In his lyrical but uneven second novel, Secret Love, Schneider returns to San Francisco a decade before Blue Bossa's action, and though jazz is woven into his narrative, it moves over to make room for a story of a different kind.

Jake Roseman, a lawyer who leads civil-rights protests in 1964 San Francisco, is a white man who whistles jazz, wears shorts to work in the dead of winter, raises two children after his wife's suicide, and allows his irascible, racist father--a concert violinist--to live with him. Though briefly faithful to his dead wife's memory, Roseman soon falls in love with Nisa Boehm, a young black actress and political activist he meets at a protest he's organized. This "secret love" is matched by another passion between two men: Simon Sims, the homosexual son of a black Baptist preacher who has become a student of Islam, and his lover, Peter Boswell. Readers will sense that Schneider's novel shares affinities with James Baldwin's Another Country--certainly in its exploration of the cultural barriers that desire breaches, but, more importantly, in its examination of a nation edging toward upheaval.

America in 1964 is a world where abortion is illegal, McCarthyite paranoia lingers and Vietnam is a rumor of smoke in the distance. It's also a place that hates interracial couples, let alone homosexual ones. Schneider's characters are clearly torn between the familiar cadences of their lives and the dissonance of the mid-'60s in which--willingly or not--they get caught up.

"Race and sexual orientation have become the great divides in this culture," Schneider told WW. It's a theme that has long interested him. Schneider, who edited the anthology Race in 1997, concedes he felt compelled to justify writing in the voice of a 20-year-old black queer, but "the act of writerly impersonation creates a lot of empathy in me for my characters." It's a commendable but not altogether successful undertaking. Consequently, Secret Love loses its way in the characters of Peter and Simon. Yet elsewhere Schneider's prose style is precise, witty and sensitive. He is at his pitch-perfect best in scenes between the emotionally stunted Jake, his overbearing father and his children; his sensual, energetic San Francisco is, in its way, another well-crafted character in Secret Love.

"Longing is where it's at for a writer," Schneider said. "It's far more useful than graduate school.
I long for what I was unable to do, where I can't be, a place and time that's disappeared. I end up creating a book filled with characters that are in the midst of their own longing--each character has their own ache." In Secret Love, the delirious swoon of new love, whether sanctioned or secret, is beautifully realized.

Even with its minor flaws, this complex, near elegiac work of anguished lovers in hate-torn times deserves our attention.