Metamorphosis

IRVKW Metamorphosis Stephen Burn Who Wrote the Book of Love? Lee Siegel University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu 235 pages; cloth, $24.00 Lee Siegel's last two novels were dense, experimental fictions that showcased the author's linguistic dexterity and formal inventiveness. Love in a DeadLanguage (1999) retold Nabokov's Lolita (1955) in a book disguised as a scholarly translation of the Kamasutra that was interspersed with pictures, a fake website, and pages printed upside down. Love and Other Games ofChance: A Novelty (2003) began as a parody oíMoby-Dick (1851), but the one hundred chapters of its story were also the squares on a Snakes and Ladders board, and Siegel encouraged the reader to play the book as a "great aleatory game." Although Siegel's new novel, Who Wrote the Book ofLove?, extends his meditation on love, it also marks a momentary retreat from these eye-catching formal explorations. Siegel's earlier work demonstrates that he evidently likes to embed his novels in non-novelistic forms, but after writing a novel in the form of a scholarly text, and one in the form of a board game, he has turned to the more accessible format of the memoir for his new book. There is much authentic narrative and linguistic energy to enjoy in the book. Who Wrote the Book ofLove? is a chronicle ofa boy's sexual awakening in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and it unfolds in ten sections that cover a year each. The narrator of the memoir is an apparently semifictional Lee Siegel, and the memoir begins in 1950, when at the age of four or five he is given a child's guide to sex by his parents. This is a seminal moment for the young Siegel, who will turn out to be obsessed notjust with love, but with books and language, too. In this respect the boy has much in common with the book's author, and Siegel subtly stresses this parallel by humorously replaying his own literary strategies through the boy's writing. Just as Siegel attempted to rewrite Nabokov and Melville in his earlier love books, so his young narrator produces a romantic revision of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) to prove in a term paper that Tom has sexual intercourse with Becky Thatcher in chapter thirty-one of the book. But while the adult author gets praised in literary journals, the boy narrator is suspended from school and dropped from the swim team. This is a hard first lesson about literary censorship. With the book's chronology tied to the narrator 's development, transformation becomes the controlling idea behind Siegel's memoir, though his earlier books insist that mutability is embedded in the word love itself. Siegel notes near the end ofLove in a DeadLanguage that: "[W]e cannot comprehend the meaning (either the intent or significance) ofour word for love. . .the meanings of abstract words in a living language cannotbe fixed; by theiressential nature they are persistently and insistently changing as the living language changes. ..."Appropriately, Who Wrote the BookofLove? builds on this idea, exploring the way the significance attached to the word love changes, and develops, as Siegel matures. The narrator views love variously as imaginary, voyeuristic, and deceptive, as he draws nearer to discovering love as a physical fulfillment. But as the concept signified by the word "love" changes for the narrator, so Siegel traces parallel changes in the young Siegel. Some development is inevitable in a memoir, but what is unusual about the metamorphoses of the narrator is the degree of self-consciousness that accompanies his transformations. This becomes clear on the many occasions when the narrator examines himself in the mirror. The first time he does this he is trying out a cowboy outfit: I looked at myselfin the large mirrors on the closet doors ofmy mother's dressing room. Ifthe doors were opened atjust the right angles to each other, I could see myself from all sides, and, when the mirrors faced each otherjust so and I squeezed in between them, millions ofcowboys lined up behind me, and another million faced me. And all of them were me. The...