The Violet Hour by James Cahill

Jim had an idea to start a book club: gay men/gay books. I was reluctant to join. I don’t often read contemporary fiction and I don’t like the idea of having to read books that someone else assigned to me. I have my own interests and limited time. But the social aspect of a book club appealed to me. The limited focus on gay stories by gay authors assured there’d always be at least some interest for me. And my time isn’t all that limited. Now that I’ve retired I have a lot of time for reading, and I read pretty fast, so I figured I could read the book club novel in a few days and then still have most of the month to read whatever I wanted to read for myself.

So I said yes to the book club and helped Jim get it organized. We invited an old friend from the Unitarian church and two guys from the Episcopal church we’ve been attending more recently. Once the initial group of five met we agreed to invite a few more guys. The group is still coming together. But at that initial meeting, over lunch in Silver Lake, the five of us chose our first book. I had made a short list of books to suggest by going through the reviews in the last several issues of the Gay and Lesbian Review. Cahill’s The Violet Hour was on my list. A few of us were attracted to the setting in the contemporary art world. We didn’t know much more about the novel, or about Cahill; this is his second novel. The Violet Hour had just come out so I was able to walk over to the Grove from my apartment and buy a copy at Barnes and Noble. They had three copies on the new fiction table.

I wish I could say I liked it more. Having learned that Cahill lives at least part time in Los Angeles I had a fantasy of inviting him to our club to speak about his book. I had just been re-living a memory of when I was nine years old and invited Sid Fleischman to speak to my third grade class and was imagining the same sort of possibility. But I’m not as enthusiastic about Cahill’s novel as I was about Sid Fleischman’s.

At 358 pages, the novel felt overly long, although it’s a quick read. (I read it in a day and a half). The story spreads further than it needs to. The writing works, but I kept noticing cliches I would have liked to replace. I found myself reaching for an editor’s pencil and wanting to cross out unnecessary words or sentences as though this were a draft manuscript not a published text. Do we need two scenes of the same character on the toilet, plus a graphic description of a dog doing its business on the sidewalk? A few too many references to men’s genitals. I’m not a prude, but there’s a place for that: in men’s pants, not literature. And there are multiple sex scenes, but not sensual or romantic: kinky sex, and public sex, and sex that requires cocaine. The feeling for me wasn’t that this was sordid, but distasteful, and because it was all performed so matter-of-factly for the characters engaged in it, it gave me a bad taste for them, too.

Many, many, artists get their names dropped. One of the main characters, Leo Goffman is an eighty-five year old Manhattan real estate developer and art collector. He happily lists his Warhol “Liz”, his Jeff Koons “Bunny”, his Barnett Neumans, his Brancusi (“Bird in Space”), his Louise Nevelson, his David Smith, his Isamu Nagouchi, his Picasso (one of the versions he did of Las Meninas) and many others. Leo and his wife started with a Kandinsky and it went from there. The wife, Deborah, died twenty years earlier. Leo keeps her memory alive with a forty-year old copy of Vanity Fair in his bedside table that has her face on the cover, and an annual charity event in her name held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Leo also collects the art of Thomas Haller, the fictional artist of the novel. Haller paints large scale, largely monochrome paintings, with subtle variations in the color and sometimes accented with a slash of contrasting color Barnett Neuman style. These are supposed to be abstract paintings and it’s supposed to be a scandal when it’s revealed late in the novel that they’re actually based on film stills from old Hollywood movies of a character’s dress, or curtains, or a lake, or the night sky, or what have you. I found Haller’s art as described by Cahill to be entirely uninteresting. But a show of his work in a London gallery is a big set scene early in the novel. His show at the close of the novel when he’s selected to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale is another.

The other major characters are two gallery owners that show Haller’s work. One, his New York gallerist, is Lorna Bedford. The two met at college in London. Though both are gay, they formed an intense friendship that on one occasion slipped into sex. Lorna got pregnant, gave birth, and quickly gave up the boy for adoption. She is, to some degree, Haller’s muse. Before turning to abstraction he painted a couple of portraits of her. She arranged a retrospective for him at the Whitney. Now, she’s hurt that he’s found a rival gallery owner, Claude Berlins, to show his new work at Berlins’ London Gallery. We learn through the course of the novel that this isn’t entirely a business arrangement as Haller and Berlins have a relationship that goes back to Haller’s art student days in Dusseldorf, a sexual attraction and a torch that continues to burn, at least on Haller’s side.

Lorna has a younger girlfriend, Justine, an academic who we meet in Lorna’s New York apartment early in the novel and who then quickly leaves for a speaking tour in Asia. They stay in touch by phone. Justine might be leaving Lorna for the woman who arranged the tour. And there’s one more important character, a young man named Luca Holder who works for Claude Berlins’ London gallery and who dies on the opening page from a fall: accident? suicide? murder? Cahill presents the death as a mystery along with a second mystery of whether this young man might in fact be Haller’s son, the boy Lorna gave up for adoption. When the facts of his death and parentage are finally revealed, it’s a bit of an anti-climax, frankly.

The time frame runs from September of one year to June of the next. The year isn’t specified but we know because it ends in a Biennale year and several characters mention COVID that it must be 2023 to 2024. Individual scenes within chapters are marked with a time stamp giving the day, hour and minute, though I’m not sure why such precision matters. The thirty-five chapters are divided into two parts. Part I is September to November, 2023. Part II is February to May, 2024.

The characters are listless and lost, depressed, and petulant. Only Leo Goffman has an arc, because he dies at the end. Lorna and Haller end up just about where they began. The whole thing is kind of a bummer. I read it quickly not because I wanted to find out what happens, but because I wanted to finish.

As I’ve just started writing a novel of my own I want to give credit to Cahill, as I would to any writer, just for getting the project done. It is serious work to write a novel. And The Violet Hour is impressive work, competent and professional, worthy to be published and read. There’s much to admire, along with my critiques above. Congratulations. And I’m curious to learn what my fellow book club members have to say.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.