The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts, Quebec America and Rome

The Traymore Rooms apartments offer refuge to a variety of colorful characters, as recorded by narrator ex-pat draft dodger Calhoun. Approaching the end of their lives, with little to offer the world except disassociated political rants and convoluted interpersonal rivalries, the older members of the community hit on long-suffering waitresses, argue over politics and observe as others play musical beds, ever aware that death is approaching. Calhoun himself is implausibly attractive to a wide variety of women, from youthful Moonface to experienced Eleanor; he eschews the opportunities this offers him and is outright hostile to newcomer Margery Prentiss for reasons unclear. Like their tirades, the book in which these characters are trapped sometimes seems endless, situations shifting through a kaleidoscope of events dissimilar on the surface but identical in their basics. One unifying theme is the narrow keyhole through which Calhoun and his male chums peer at the women around them, relentlessly assessing them in terms of allure, affronted whenever one of the objects of desire expresses urges and ambitions not defined by those of the men. Although the individual men have their charms, the overall effect is to present them as self-absorbed sexist relics of a now vanished age, theatrical figures who will vanish having achieved little. (Aug.)