Austrian writer Peter Handke begins his 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell with the following:
“Jefferson Street is a quiet thoroughfare in Providence. It circles around the business section, changes its name to Norwich Street in the South End, and leads into the old Boston Post Road. Here and there Jefferson Street widens into small squares bordered by beech and maple trees. On one of these, Wayland Square, there is a good-sized building in the style of an English manor house, the Wayland Manor Hotel. When I arrived there at the end of April, the desk clerk took a letter from my pigeonhole and handed it to me along with my key. Before entering the elevator, I tore open the envelope, which, come to think of it, was barely sealed. The letter was short: ‘I am in New York. Please don’t look for me. It would not be nice for you to find me.’”
If that doesn’t grab your attention, nothing will.
What follows in the novel delivers on the promise of this opening paragraph. The narrator, a nameless traveler whose marriage has ended, is visiting the United States from Austria and at first we think he is stalking his ex-wife Judith but it soon becomes apparent that it is she who is in pursuit of our protagonist, as he makes his way from Providence to Philadelphia to St. Louis to Oregon and finally to Los Angeles, where an unexpected encounter with a Hollywood legend brings the story to its strange yet oddly fitting conclusion.
Along the way we get an outsider’s—if not an entirely detached—view of America of the early 1970s and, though almost forty years have passed since the novel’s publication, Handke’s cutting observations seem as relevant as ever. In what reads at times like a magazine travel piece and at other times like avant-garde short fiction, Handke keeps readers off balance but engrossed throughout as he dissects, in first-person narration, every gesture, every fault and motivation, the landscape, the cities and places visited, the people met, the culture as a whole. The novel celebrates and evaluates America. And Handke’s brutally honest prose leaves readers, in the end, feeling as though they’ve experienced this cross-country escapade for themselves.
In the first part of the book the protagonist is mostly alone. This changes in Phoenixville, a town west of Philadelphia, where he reunites with Claire, a woman he’d met three years earlier, on another visit to America, and with whom he’d “made love just once” and whom he confesses he hardly knows. They drive together to St. Louis with Claire’s two-year-old daughter Delta Benedictine (“not by me,” he notes), and they visit and stay with two of Claire’s friends (“they’re lovers,” Claire explains). It’ll take three days to get there from Phoenixville; in three days our narrator will turn thirty years of age. He tells Claire that he can’t wait. To get to St. Louis or to be thirty? she says. To be thirty and in St. Louis, he replies.
Handke’s description of his St. Louis lovers is so complete and his narrator’s judgment of them so utterly relentless and incisive that I’d say it’s almost worth reading Short Letter, Long Farewell for this section alone.
