By Arlene Heyman
Bloomsbury, £16.99
Scary Old Sex is a collection of short stories that strike to the bone of loving relationships - and to their flesh as well. The stories engage primarily with marriages between partners who were married before and at least one of whom is what the French refer to as well above "a certain age". Women emerging from their forties and men even older will find Heyman's love-stories enthralling, and reassuring too, as regards long-term sexual zest.
The author, Arlene Heyman, is not only a gifted story-teller; she is also a doctor and a psychoanalyst. And presumably it is thanks to Heyman's profession and to its requisite objectivity that she writes with creative imagination, unexpected from a female author, about the man's position (as it were) in love, and she treats his reactions with as much sympathy and understanding as that of females.
Though this book is Heyman's debut in the writing of fiction, she is no kid herself; Heyman is a witty and intellectually spry 70-year-old.
In spite of the book's title and although many of its tales transpire in bed or near one, they are as much, if not more about the dynamic of long-term companionship, and some of them are about more than that.
Her story, Dancing, for example, set in Manhattan at the time of the fall of the twin towers, tells a tale of love and personal loss among individuals, including a young boy, and evokes the heartbreaking surprise of that disaster. The other stories, too, are set in America, many of them in her native east-coast area. Local geography is of course incidental to stories concerned with idiosyncrasies of human relationships, particularly between partners widely divided in age. Nevertheless, a fellow east-coast American feels at home reading dialogue that rings true universally and often with New York twang and idiom.
Readers whose curiosity about Arlene Heyman is roused by her talent, her relatively advanced age at the time of publication and her unexpected knowledge of science will no doubt Google her. And so they will learn that she was the student of Bernard Malamud, who was at that time more than twice her 19 years, and thereafter she became his companion for more than 20 years.
With this in mind, the delay of her own first literary offering will make some readers wonder how intimidating it must be for an emergent young talent to sit desk-to-desk with a writer already up there next to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, fellow American geniuses of the pen and, incidentally, fellow Jews, too.
The story Heyman dedicates to Malamud is entitled, In Love with Murray. It concerns two visual rather than verbal artists with a large age gap between them.
The young woman is abject when her much older lover expresses his guilt and concern at depriving her of a "normal" partnership: "No, no, she cries… You've made my time precious, made my life precious… I revere you!"
Indeed, Scary Old Sex, while possessing elements of a profound and humane sex manual, can also be read as a tribute to reverential love.
