She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me: A Novel

by Herbert Gold

Veteran San Francisco private eye Dan Kasdan manages to find and then lose Pricilla, the love of his life, several times over the course of thirty years, always competing with his criminal counterpart, Karim.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 1997

About the author

San Francisco literary icon Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. After several of his poems were accepted by literary magazines as a teenager, he studied philosophy at Columbia University, where he befriended writers who would define the Beat Generation, from Anaïs Nin to Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris, where he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne and worked on his first novel Birth of a Hero, published in 1951.

Gold wrote more than thirty books, including the bestsellers Fathers and The Man Who Was Not With It and received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard.

Gold returned to writing poetry in the last years of his life, creating the book Father Verses Sons, A Correspondence in Poems with his sons, filmmaker Ari Gold and musician Ethan Gold, which was finalized in the weeks before his death, and is now being published by Rare Bird Lit. He also acted in a companion film, Brother Verses Brother coming in late 2024.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in two minds about this novel. It brims with wonderful bits of writing, and yet I found it rather hard going. At the end of reading it I didn't feel as if I'd completed a journey of any kind, as if the novel had bamboozled me by giving me the impression I was reading a story but not offering me an actual story. The central characters are all essentially where they were at the outset; no one seems to have learned very much. I've witnessed a slice of living, as it were, but that's all.

The plot, such as it is: Dan Kasdan is a San Francisco gumshoe. His best pal and sounding board, Alfonzo, is an overweight cop. Dan, we soon learn, is separated from his wife Priscilla, the mother of his young son Jeff. We then go into a long flashback -- the bulk of the book -- about their love and marriage, how it was so bright and raunchy and then slowly stagnated until Priscilla felt she needed to move along. Dan's still crazy about her; she still feels the occasional addict's stir for him. Through the later stages of this flashback, and in the present, local pornographer-and-worse Karim is putting pressure on Dan to start doing odd jobs for him: he's attracted by Dan's sterling record for integrity, both because this may make the cops less likely to poke their noses in and because, we begin to believe, he wants the thrill of corrupting the man who's supposedly incorruptible. Dan tries to cope with things. Er, that's it.

I suspect I'll be puzzling away over this book for a while, so in that sense you could say it's succeeded in a novel's task of making the reader think. On the other hand, my puzzling's going to be more irritated than anything else, so . . .

[Alok Ghimire · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been a great book if not for the shallow dragging of a shallow premise - a decently deep man straddled with a ambitious vixen of a wife (shallow ambition ofc) can't get himself to admit the whole scape of her world is beneath him, that whatever beauty she holds is his giving. I despise colloquialisms, especially when an obviously intelligent mind tries to extract folksy wisdom out of the ramblings and rovings of plain simple greedy animals.