After Camus

In this singular tale, Neugeboren (Imagining Robert) traces an American couple’s faltering marriage over several decades through the lens of their shared interest in French author Albert Camus. Tolle Anne Riordan meets Camus in 1959 Paris, shortly before his death, and they have a brief affair. In 1965, Saul Davidoff meets Tolle at an anti-war protest in New York City. Their relationship over the next 40 years grows strained by Saul’s grueling job as a doctor caring for AIDS patients, a calling he took up in part because of inspiration from Camus’s The Plague. His secret affair with another woman doesn’t help. In 2004, Tolle and Saul visit Spéracèdes, France, to try to rekindle their romance. Their pasts soon come back to haunt them, however: Fiona Casey, Saul’s dying lover, tracks him down; Tolle works through difficult memories of childhood abuse in a one-sided dialogue with Camus; and their daughter, Julia, arrives in France pregnant. Neugeboren keenly draws on themes from Camus’s own writing as he probes the depths of his characters’ heartbreak and healing. The result is a moving drama that does justice to the literary lion at its center. Agent: Murray Weiss, Catalyst Literary. (Feb.)