A delightful new novel, "Then God Is Forgiven" by Carson City's Sam Bauman, begins with the story's ending, a funeral in England. The description is brief, but we can tell that the funeral is for a woman who is the center of the story to follow, and it sets the stage for a flashback to a long-term love that grabs the heart of a young man and never lets go.
The story begins in the 1950s. Twenty-three-year-old Max Baker is on a Fulbright Scholarship when he attends a performance of Shaw's St. Joan in the town of Portsmouth, England. When Joan makes her appearance in the form of 21-year-old actress Megan Walton, Max is so struck by her presence and beauty it's as if he'd seen an apparition. Although not especially confident with women, he manages to introduce himself to her after the show. They go to a party, have a short talk during which Max mentions a one-act play that he has written. Megan expresses interest, but then meets up with a man she knows, and she leaves.
Max next sees Megan the following week in London where she is doing an audition. This time she is with another man. She chats with Max briefly, and he gives her a copy of his play before she quickly leaves, again with the other man.
Max doesn't hear any more about her until he is ready to return to the states. He receives a short letter from her saying that she likes his play. The letter has a P.S.: She has just gotten married to yet a third man, a Swedish film director.
This news nearly devastates Max as he begins to see a pattern in Megan that will likely preclude him from ever having a more serious relationship with his dream girl. He returns to Ohio and gets a job writing advertising copy while trying to shop his script around in his spare time. After nothing but rejections, Max quits Ohio and drives to Southern California where he gets a job as a junior-junior writer for Warner Bros., referred to throughout the novel as "The Brothers."
Eventually, Max is approached by Ian, a senior writer who needs help because his recent screenplays were flops. Ian and Max eventually become a successful team writing movie scripts. Max begins to earn real money, and The Brothers are happy.
This good new life for Max is interrupted by two big events.
The first happens when the Swedish director takes on one of Max and Ian's scripts and "introduces" them to one of his actors, his wife Megan.
Later, Max says to Ian that Megan is lovely, adding an internal thought that is one of dozens of great lines in the book: "Saying Megan is lovely is 'Like calling the Pacific a lot of water.'" Ian remarks on Max's understatement, saying she is the most beautiful woman he's ever met.
Now that Max and Megan are working together on the same movie, they kindle a relationship of sorts that goes from cool to warm and back again. In spite of Max's desires, Megan directs the course of their relationship from the beginning, demonstrating that the person least committed in a relationship has all the power. Max merely responds to her wishes, recognizing at some deep level that his wishes don't really matter to her.
The other big event that changes Max's world is when Senator Joe McCarthy names first Megan, and then later, Max as one of countless targets in his communist witch hunt. When Max is called to testify, he reveals that he went to Antioch College where there were lots of communist sympathizers and even a few members of the party. This association lands Max on McCarthy's blacklist, and Max must flee to Europe to avoid incarceration.
Although Max lives a long time in Europe, still working for The Brothers, he sees Megan occasionally because Megan has become a big movie star, and she travels frequently for both work and pleasure.
One of the ongoing aspects of Megan's life that distresses Max is Megan's constant flings with multiple men, especially race car drivers. Although the relationships are casual, she still tends to marry them. And due to the exceptionally high mortality caused by their careers, she tends to become widowed as well. However, none of these experiences seem to affect Megan much, and they reveal that she is at heart a narcissistic woman who doesn't invest enough in others to maintain any kind of a deep relationship.
Max meets and is distracted by Megan's sister Colleen, an oil painter. Although she is not as scintillating as Megan, she nevertheless is charming and attractive, and Max ends up marrying her. The marriage seems to work well, but the reader never forgets Max's feelings for Megan. Max's inability to put those feelings in the past is his singular character flaw. We can never fully enjoy Max's intermittent happiness because we are aware of a dark shadow of the love he never had haunting his psyche.
The novel is told in the First Person from Max's point of view, and the narrative comes off just like Max, engaging and breezy, leaving the deeper aspects of the story to gradually sneak up on the reader. The reader gets to look over Max's shoulder, traveling the Western world from Ohio to Hollywood to Mexico City to the East Coast and on to many of the great cities of Europe.
The travelogue component makes for a fun backdrop as we get an illuminating look into a world of characters who become as real as our friends. The food is great, the company is interesting, and, as with friends, we wish we could go back to those beaches and restaurants and race tracks to relive the good moments, editing out the bad.
Bauman appears to craft a light and jaunty coming-of-age novel about a young man from Ohio, complete with his lusts and his one true love. But the strength of the book is in how, without getting especially dark, it becomes something not light and jaunty at all. We end up caring a great deal as the young man learns the consequences of a love that borders on obsession with a woman who doesn't reciprocate.
Then God Is Forgiven also teaches us about many subjects. Bauman throws in countless intelligent comments on art, poetry, opera, architecture, history, race car-driving and, of course, screenwriting.
Although Bauman is not the least bit preachy, his narrative also does a good job of revealing just what a knee-jerk slime Senator McCarthy was and how much he damaged good people during the blacklist era.
Also impressive is how Bauman shows Max pining not just for the Megan that is, a beautiful movie star, but the Megan he wishes might have been, a woman with a much stronger sense of commitment to long-term ideals and relationships. It is as if Max is aware that even if Megan had married him and wanted to stay married to him, her constitution is defective in ways that would have made their relationship untenable.
The title, Then God Is Forgiven, is taken from a John O'Hara quote about dying without fear. It does a good job of summing up Bauman's hopes for his character experiencing her last moment alive without fear.
In the end, the story becomes a one-way love affair between a flawed but generally good man who is fixated on a beautiful but much more flawed woman. Their only real common ground is theater. And Bauman's book about them makes good theater for the rest of us.
Then God Is Forgiven is available at xlibris.com and should be available at Barnes and Noble as well as amazon.com in a few weeks.
Then God Is Forgiven
Sam Bauman
ISBN 978-1-4363-3859-2
• Reviewed by Todd Borg, author of the Owen McKenna Tahoe Mystery series