Christopher Coe's "I Look Divine": An Elegy for Someone Who Could Not Stand the Prospects of Aging

The copy of Christopher Coe's 1987 novel I Look Divine that we read had previously owned by someone French (at least there is a beginning and an end date in "mars" of 1989). This seems highly appropriate, since the book is what the French call a récit, a relatively condensed intense narration of a story with a small cast of characters (like André Gide's Pastoral Symphony). The narrator of I Look Divine is the less brilliant and less beautiful of a pair of affluent gay brothers whose parents died young.

The extraordinary one is dead at 37. I assumed he died of AIDS, but I was wrong. The surviving brother looks at photographs, including a life-size one of his brother atop a Chichen Itza pyramid. Nicholas never smiled so as not to develope wrinkles. Along with the unsmiling photos, there are many other possessions, many of them tributes from older men when Nicholas was young and gorgeous -- not to mention pretentious and narcissistic to the edge of madness... Nicholas is something of a Dorian Gray -- who must be youthgul-looking or not be -- of and for the late-20th century.

The narrator, whose name is never given, was often appalled but is still mesmerized by his younger brother, and bewildered by the extinguishing of Nicholas's life and the debris of it that evokes the memories that are the text. (I think the reader does not need to know anything more about the narrator than what his voice and memories reveal.) The prose is exquisite, and frequently very funny, although the book is an elegy, not a comedy either a social or a psychological about someone deadly serious about the cult of youth and beauty.

Before Coe died un 1994 (again, I assume of AIDS), he wrote a sprawling novel unlike the hard, lucid (gemlike) I Look Divine, Such Times, also reportedly built on flashbacks.

Nicholas wonders "who are people trying to fool, when they go through their lives acting just like themselves" -- though it could easily be argued that he did himself, accepting tributes until 30, then paying for what he could no longer be (young and perfect), since "one person must be amazed to be with the other."

The book does not feature an exquisite corpse, but a body when exquisiteness starts to fade (a horror story of sorts -- the Dorian Gray sort). The prose is beautifully wrought, the values by which Nicholas lived and died by wince-inducing.