I use that inert word “project” both because it’s a word Harold uses and because his romantic intrigue springs not from something as conventional as, say, swooning over a woman he catches sight of at a party, but from a remark he overhears one of his housemates make over the phone: “Well, she’s mad about him, isn’t she? At least in the physical sense.” The remark, about a woman he’s never met, gives Harold a “peculiar shudder”; it is “the purest expression I had ever heard of a love that was indistinguishable from sexual desire,” he writes. “I felt myself grow hot and tight. I wanted someone, but for what?”
The desire will be in service of his literary efforts; at least that’s what he tells himself. Soon, at a party, he meets the woman in question, Charlotte. The conceptual project quickly becomes real, then a little too real. He seduces her, and their affair becomes the catalyst for her separation from her husband, Joshua, a young physician and the man she used to be “mad” about. Charlotte moves into the house Harold shares with three others, the two of them start seeing other people they catch sight of at parties, and the affair fizzles.
If the arc sounds trite, it also echoes the feeling Harold has after he first writes down the words “at least in the physical sense” in his diary. First, he feels the words “losing their force,” and then they become “empty, banal.” The more he thinks about them and tries to remember hearing them, the more “the magic eluded me, however briefly just a thought away, then receded into the irretrievable distance, until I found myself staring at something that, like an exhausted love affair, embarrassed me with the memory of what it had once been.”
Something else that hangs over “The Nenoquich” like an exhausted love affair is the 1960s. The book is told from a state of aftermath. Harold and his housemates Jimmy Wax, Shaw and Donna live a communal existence, occasionally strung out, possibly burned out; a polite way of putting it might be to say they’re all going through a transitional phase. Donna, the youngest of them, trained in classical piano, plays keyboard in a nightclub act. Shaw is a former political radical whom Harold recalls meeting at a riot “in a pose like the discus thrower’s but more extreme, and in his hand instead of a discus was a dark green bottle with a burning rag in its mouth.” The target is a U.S. Army vehicle that goes up in flames.