Synopsis

A troubled marriage and love story set against the background of the AIDS pandemic and the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq lie at the heart of After Camus. Saul Davidoff and Tolle Riordan, who meet during a protest against the Vietnam War, marry, live through the Plague Years of the AIDS epidemic, raise a family … and burn out. Camus is a hero to both of them: Tolle, a young dancer and choreographer, has a liaison with him in Paris shortly before his death; Saul, inspired by Camus’s The Plague, becomes an infectious disease (and AIDS) doctor … and Camus becomes a ghostly presence central to our story.

Hoping to repair their marriage, Tolle and Saul return to a village in the South of France where they lived when they were first in love and where Camus lived when recovering from a siege of tuberculosis. The novel draws a vivid portrait of a marriage that spans a series of historical events: from the Vietnam War through the AIDs epidemic and Gulf War to the Iraq War and the advent of the right-wing Le Pen movement in France. After Camus is both a fictional meditation on recent history and a compelling tale of how various forms of love and friendship do and do not survive in times of social and political upheaval. In this novel of enchantments, internationally acclaimed author Jay Neugeboren is at the peak of his powers as a master storyteller.

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Excerpt

Often, when he doubted his love for her—or, more exactly, his capacity for love—or wondered why and how they had stayed with each other for more than forty years in a time when most people they knew—friends, relatives, colleagues—had divorced and moved on to new couplings and marriages—he would go back to the beginning.  This is how we met, he’d say to himself, and by telling himself the story again, no matter how many times he did, and no matter his knowledge that the effect of doing so was transient, he would for a brief while be reassured.  But reassured about what?  That they had been truly, deeply in love once upon a time?  That they had not erred in marrying, or in having children, or in remaining married?  That she did still love him and was devoted to him no matter the ways, they had, through the years, distanced themselves from one another?

More likely, he mused—they were driving south along a country road in France on a clear, unseasonably warm early February morning—Tolle had insisted they not take autoroutes, that they wind their way down from Paris at a leisurely pace—by conjuring up the first time they met, he was able to feel again what he rarely did of late: some genuine affection for Tolle, for the young man he had once been, and for the man he had become.

He saw himself standing across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Veteran’s Day, 1965.  The air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, the crowd of anti-war protestors, among whom he stood, animated and happy.  How, on such a day, standing side by side with people of like mind and heart, could one believe anything was amiss with the world, or that whatever was amiss could not, with good will and hard work, be set right?  Across the street, crowds that lined the sidewalk behind police barricades with their banners, posters, and flags—in support of the war in Vietnam—seemed equally happy, so that the chants each side launched into the air seemed little  more than friendly cheers for rival football teams.

Tolle, in the front row of protestors, wore a pale V-neck lavender sweater, a purple paisely scarf knotted loosely around her neck.  Her wheat-colored hair,  shoulder-length, was, in the autumn sunlight, laced with threads of gold, and she appeared to him to have stepped straight out of a Saks Fifth Avenue advertisement so as to take her place—out of place—among those whose fashions seemed, for the most part, to have been purchased from clothing racks in Salvation Army thrift stores.

She seemed the kind of woman—beautiful, cool, poised—who had always had the power to intimidate him: a woman who, he assumed, went to debutante balls with self-assured men who were destined to become diplomats, to run Fortune 500 companies, to own yachts, and—always, always—to sweat less than he did.  He imagined she read Jane Austen, vacationed in Monaco, had lunch at the Plaza.  What, then, was she doing in the front line of anti-war protestors?  And what could a young woman like her ever want with an intense, curly-headed Jewish boy from Brooklyn?

Still, when she turned and looked his way, and when she smiled at him—a quizzical glance, as in: We’ve met before, yes?—he gained the courage he needed, pushed through the crowd, and made his way to her side.

He began talking at once—about the rally, about the weather, about the war, about the organization she was with (she held a placard that identified her as a member of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy)—about whatever came to mind, and she responded easily.  Encouraged, and eager to impress, he alluded to the fact that he had rearranged his schedule at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where he was doing a residency in infectious disease, in order to be at the rally, and also that he was a member of The Resistance and, although above draft age, was intending soon, in a public ceremony, to burn his draft card with those of draft age.  When chants from both sides of the street grew louder, she tugged on her right ear with thumb and forefinger to indicate that it was difficult to hear him.  Her pale hazel-green eyes, above ruddy high-colored cheeks, seemed almost translucent, and—what he had not expected—warm and inviting.

He looked to the right—uptown, to where she pointed—and saw that a military band was approaching, its music—Sousa’s familiar “Stars and Stripes Forever”—blasting away.  Behind the band, a phalanx of soldiers in camouflage khakis, rifles to their shoulders, marched in lock-step, policemen on motorcyles cruising slowly at their sides.

Closer to him, she asked his name.

“Saul,” he said.  “Saul Davidoff.”

She shook his hand.  “I’m glad to meet you, Saul Davidoff,” she said, then held to his arm briefly.  “But would you excuse me, please?” she said, and turned away, slipped under the wooden barricade, walked out onto Fifth Avenue and, along with about twenty others, sat down in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the oncoming parade.

Excerpt from AFTER CAMUS. Copyright © 2024 by Jay Neugeboren. Published by Madville Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

About the Author

JAY NEUGEBOREN is the author of 22 books, including five prize-winning novels, four collections of award-winning stories, and two prize-winning books of non-fiction about mental illness: Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival and Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness.

His stories and essays have appeared widely in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychiatric Services, Ploughshares, Black Clock, Tablet, Commonweal,  among others, and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Penguin Modern Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes.  His archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas.

Nuegeboren was a Professor and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as well as the Director of the Graduate MFA Writing Program there. He has taught at other universities, including Stanford, Indiana, S.U.N.Y. at Old Westbury, and Freiburg (Germany).  He now lives and writes in New York City, where he is on the faculty of the Writing Program of the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.

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