The Death of a Constant Lover, by Lev Raphael

[Ulysses]

As I settle into this series – book 3 of eight – I’m getting used to the slightly bizarre combination of pastoral superlatives and interpersonal atrocities that make up Nick Hoffman’s life. I guess this is always the problem when you set a series of murder mysteries in the same place: it makes that place seem weirdly cursed. It’s rather like the superb Inspector Lewis series that PBS put out – you wonder why anyone in their right mind would send a child to Oxford when students seem to get murdered every month or so (not to mention the faculty). But Nick and his longtime partner Stefan Borowski seem to be settled into the upscale suburban comfort of the fictional Michiganopolis, each of them pursuing his academic career at the huge state university, Stefan as a writer, Nick as a teacher of writing.

Throughout the books there is an odd counterpoint between the mayhem-filled outside world and the elegant, comfortable retreat of their house. In between fairly appalling murders and almost equally grisly interactions with university faculty and administrators, Nick and Stefan meet back at their lovely colonial home. Here they talk, cook, garden, fight, make love and generally fret about the mess going on outside their door. It’s interesting how important this house is to this series (so far). Raphael makes such conscious effort to describe the ingredients and actions of their cooking, the type of wine and alcohol they drink, the colors and contours of the rooms and the garden, that it seems to represent a sort of protective spell the two men cast to insulate themselves from the horrors without.

This is part of what I find so compelling about the Nick Hoffman books: there is so much going on that happens on a very intimate scale. Ostensibly about murders, the books are really about relationships, first and foremost is that of the two protagonists. Nick is out and around the campus, witnessing murders, talking to people and trying to navigate the minefield of his career and to discover why bad things happen. But Stefan almost never interacts with anyone “on screen” except for Nick, and whatever mutual friend or acquaintance might be with them. We learn nothing about Stefan’s academic life except through Nick’s passing references. What we learn about Stefan is through Nick’s close observation of their life together.

One character in this book comments that “Stefan and Nick are so smooth together—like ice skaters with perfect lines.” But that’s external perception. Nick and Stefan are not Ozzie and Harriet. They have baggage, much of it drawn from their fraught relationships with their rather different Jewish parents, all of whom are in some ways survivors of the Holocaust. But it goes beyond that; neither man is a particularly easy person to get along with. We don’t fall into relaxed affection for Nick or for Stefan. Stefan is aloof and self-absorbed. Nick is neurotic and, frankly, sort of whiney. They’re both rather emotionally stunted, except possibly with each other. Nick ruminates, as he watches Stefan react to bad professional news: “There was a special cruelty in life to watching someone you love suffer and being utterly unable to help.” They’re not immediately likeable, and yet there’s an endearing honesty in both of them. Confronted with an arrogant but beautiful graduate student, Nick admits, “Maybe someday I would stop being unnerved by men who were so handsome and self-assured, but I didn’t think it’d be any time soon.” Raphael takes great pains to bring out the internal goodness of both men, those faithful, committed personalities that bind them with love to each other and ultimately make the reader (or, at least, this reader) grow to love them in turn like difficult friends one has known for many years.

As central to the flavor of the narrative as the murders are, it is the university itself that is the largest and, frankly, most appalling character in the story. In referring to the students at SUM, Nick reflects that “[t]hey were at the university only because SUM wanted their money. Education had long since stopped being a privilege at SUM and the country at large: it was nothing more than a business transaction, and often a rip-off.” With some exceptions—allies Nick has made in the earlier books, and a potential good new friend who appears in this one for the first time—the faculty are described as an “assemblage of braggarts, egotists, careerists and no-talents.” When Nick and Stefan visit the dean of their college as they probe the facts surrounding the murder, Nick remarks: “I felt suffocated by heat and clichés: the leather bound author sets, the hunting prints, the lead crystal bottle stoppers on the Renaissance style bar cabinet, the smug air of anglo-fraudulence.” It’s a funny line, but it does make one wonder why either of them wants to stay here. And, indeed, they ask each other that very question.

I don’t mean to say that the murder mystery doesn’t matter, but the facts of death are very deeply intertwined with the dynamics of Nick and Stefan’s interactions with other people in their lives, and with the dynamics of their own relationship. Death is a catalyst, a trigger, but it is never really the point. That may sound odd for a murder mystery, but for me it’s at the center of what makes these books so good.