Nothing Lasts Forever: Three Novellas

Steiner (Matinee) challenges with three dark novellas. The first, “Into the Green Ocean Deep,” portrays, in intimate and obsessive detail, an unnamed woman dying of cancer and the lover caring for her. Told in long, sparsely punctuated sentences, the woman is “afflicted with existence and the dread of nonexistence.” In “Inviolate,” a man, also unnamed, is comatose and thus “could not embrace the opportunities dying created.” His wife whispers to his insensate body: “Anguish… proves there’s life.” Steiner’s primary theme seems to be that pain is as profound a symbol of life as joy or happiness or desire (indeed, perverse aura of desire wafts throughout this difficult collection). In “Negative Space” a man observes his unfaithful wife in the predawn hours and muses, darkly and elliptically, that “the voice of infidelity is the most erotic they will hear.” In Steiner’s universe, death, decay, and debasement are constants; his work exudes an existential angst reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, but without the wit or the humanity. This is a very grim enterprise. (Mar.)