The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
Daniel Mendelsohn
For a book I was often inclined to disagree with, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity proved intensely pleasurable. In his genre-defying weave of searching memoir and wobblingly earnest argument, Daniel Mendelsohn spins such a shimmering web of language and stories that I felt an urge to convince myself that I shared his feelings.
"What is it like when two men have sex?" Mendelsohn asks at the opening of a typically well-rendered passage. "All straight men...know what it is like to penetrate a partner during intercourse, to be inside the other; all women who have had intercourse know what it is like...to have the other be inside oneself. But the gay man in the very moment he is either penetrating his partner or being penetrated by him, knows exactly what his partner is feeling and experiencing even as he himself has his own experience of exactly the opposite. Sex between gay men dissolves otherness into sameness...there is nothing that either party doesn't know about the other...
"When men have sex with women, they fall into the woman...she is the end point...She is the destination. It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again."
With graceful prose and precisely chosen vocabulary, Mendelsohn builds his points here—and throughout the book—from the stuff of poetry more than that of logic. It would be all too easy to leap in and attempt to scientifically and semantically dismantle much of what Mendelsohn has wrought. And it would probably be the right thing to do if the author offered up his book as a political-philosophical case for what all of our lives should be. But he does not. Despite the references to generalized "women" and "men," the subject of this book is Mendelsohn.
And Daniel Mendelsohn is a singular character, a classics lecturer at Princeton who lives half of his weeks in Chelsea, socializing with gay friends and trolling AOL for fleeting sexual encounters, the remainder of his days are spend in leafy suburban New Jersey, where he shares a house with his old friend Rose and her small son, his godson. Rose, in one of the piquant personal ironies that fleck the pages of this book with a savor of mystery and fate, is a mathematician, as was Mendelsohn's father.
Inextricably interwoven with Mendelsohn's meditations on sexuality, language (his early fascination with the "unspoken tongues" of Greek and Latin is fraught with a simultaneously romantic and neurotic sense of solitude and evasion), and memory are his beautifully skewed interpretations of mythology (Narcissus is altogether empathic) and detailed anecdotes from his own life story (a son of well-to-do Long Island Jews, undergraduate Mendelsohn revels in his out-of-placeness at the WASP nest that is the University of Virginia and first indulges a never-ending craving for fair-haired Southern boys).
The intriguing ambiguities of Mendelsohn's autobiographical material are so clearly the wellspring for what at first seem to be his broader social views (monogamy is unnatural for gay men, a sense of personal wholeness is impossible to attain), that one's possible inclination to disagree with him ultimately has little point. This is an intimate, Narcissistic (in the best, empathic sense) book, which would be more accurately subtitled "The Riddle of My Identity." What's inspiring—and altogether agreeable—about it are not so much the tortuous specifics of the life Mendelsohn tells, but his genuine passion—an upbeat, never self-pitying passion—to read and interpret his own path through the world as he might read a piece of literature, to feel his life as a work of art.
