Jamie Is My Heart's Desire by Alfred Chester

Jamie Is My Heart's Desire Reviews

• 
  Mariel

  Back round over round back: staring, trooping, talking into my passive hulk of sleeplessness; confusion unclarified by repetition. And Jamie; and why; and what. Why can't I see him? Why can they? What spot in my eye is blind? What twist in my brain prevents the impression from coming through? And worst of all, the question that scratches sleep away, that tosses and twitches my body through the night- have I acknowledged the blindness as mine?

  
  
  Harry is the time growing hunger in Breakfast at Tiffany's Holly going unlightly after her soul fur into the homeless street. Nameless and naming, cat. Another hungry watches her, watches them, and I wondered about other people's loneliness again. How it seems their lonely is if black were truly a color. It is compared to mine that feels empty white, unless they are drawing on it. How could she almost have thrown away her only treasure, to live together with no show. I want to go back to the danger to save it. To color the unreality of the day to day it is necessary to lull into feeling like real life just to get up and go to work again. Harry must have shrugged off their signs as he doesn't see the point in caring about anything. What is the point if a inner book of calm nestles closest to your heart. White pages bleed inky blood and writing on the skin. Women read save me, or forget me, or wait, don't wait. Childhood friend Wallace switches faces with Harry. He must have. Maybe he wore a sign on his back that kicked you if you read it for support when life edged you further into the space you fall into when chairs, anything, are pulled out from underneath you. Their childhood girl Emily must have bought some condominium she couldn't afford in that space and then refused to give up on the bad investment. Fancy fancying yourself in love with the easy to laugh and easier to forget Wallace. Emily is between her body she cannot own up to. Big on the outside with a little girl trapped in her mirror. She's a princess of knowing exactly what to do. The strength dies if she's read by her friends. I don't know when it happened that Harry and I started reading the hanging light bulbs over heads, the signs of mutual body heat, instead of what is the point and run away. The relief in not having to do anything because the people around you are crying. Whatever that bleeding shift is when the decision is made to keep that part of yourself. The almost lost and the saving.
  
  Holding their arms back in the do it don't do it jump precipice of a plot description is Mark. I saw him as Pinocchio if Gepetto were a particularly emo mortician. I don't recall where Harry met this wet blank and a half (and then some!). Amazingly it is not him on his death bed but the object of his flu poetry, his brother Jamie.
  
  Martha Bacon of The New York Herald Tribune wrote that Jamie is My Heart's Desire "makes very little sense (or what we construe as sense) but very good reading". If she can't do it then I don't know what hope I have. If I've ever made sense in a book review (and I'm talking even the straight forward stuff) then that's bloody fantastic. Good for me. It was a fluke.
  
  Harry cannot see Jamie. He is the clothes of the emperor for Emily. I absolutely loved her account of meeting the beautiful boy in the shop window. Hanging in the store window is the chilling pronouncement (if "it is funny because it is true" is a cliche there should still be a version for tragedies of this) to enjoy your two weeks of vacation a year because it is the only time that belongs to you. I know exactly how she feels. The bottom has been dropped out of the illusion you carefully constructed to survive because of a cruel shop advertisement. Then this boy in the window gestures for her to turn back around into the street and it is over. The nightmare of truth is over by looking elsewhere. Or was it the voice outside of yourself you will listen to. I only wish it would be so easy when I remember that I don't own my own life except for two weeks out of the year. To the died of constipation on the toilet expressions of Mark he is the death of him. I don't understand what it is to be Mark anymore than I get the on to the next Wallace. Wallace should live in parties and small talk for his real life. Okay, so if writing plot descriptions should ever save my life I will have to die. It isn't my fault (this time) because Alfred Chester was crazy. I love the man to death (I hadn't finished The Exquisite Corpse and I went online to purchase everything he had ever written. I blew through them all and I really, really wish I had more). But I can't do it. What happens is life between the lines. It is in it never happened and you were that chick who analyzed to death the two second interaction with a guy into a lifetime. Better than that. You were the chick who read as much as possible (life has to be more than two weeks) and forget the dead hand's brush of "Do you love me?". I don't know if Jamie was dying in that room or if he ever existed. I couldn't stop watching when Harry let go of before when you were throwing the cat into the gutter and jump, or go away, I don't care about anything. He couldn't see Jamie and the people in his life were enthralled to something he would have to want on faith.
  
  If I compare it to Chester's short stories it isn't as perfect as those. There were touch and go moments of talking to explain too much when Harry's girlfriend Tess decides for him (but who hasn't seen themselves lived this way). But oh, how can I deny Chester? When Harry's horrid boss at the funeral home mistakes (or does he) Mark for a bereaved client. His grave walking cold speeches wilt Mark further. Anything like this. I would give my guts to be able to write as Alfred Chester did. I'm right there when they are going to fall. What would the right words to yourself be. What could you say to yourself to turn around? I get fed up with myself in book reviews with my blah blah blah me but if I don't try to pin the unique catharsis of Alfred Chester I probably wouldn't even bother. It is something about being so hungry for something. I get this feeling about him over and over of if you could only jump. Peel back the green monster skin to the blue underneath. Harry's embryonic heart and did you ever feel your own grave's dirt of too much. If you were Audrey Hepburn, or the cat, or the poor sap watching from the cold rain. I can't help but respond to this strange story about the people inside, the melting. Emily was in love with Wallace who she could never have, to the point she felt like a pretend version of herself whenever with him (built on her condo of tricking herself to get through days. I'm fascinated with Emily's masks, and how Harry discovers them), and if a good cry would be so easy and make it go away, like if what they said about time healing all wounds was true. I don't know how he created this feeling of time or letting it all out but he did. He could show you what people thought they were and what everyone else thought they were in a funny little weird book. The transplanted heart is further than yours. I just loved reading it anyway, no matter how what the fuck the ending kinda was. I love Alfred Chester. If only I had more of his books to read when I felt lost like that and you don't even know why or who. I never know what to do. (My heart's desire.)
  
  

  It is all silliness and idleness, the inability of the human being to reconcile himself to what he is. And even if it were the face of the Poet upon him, it would be very sad for Mark, for this face is not one of beauty or order, but of greater plainness than his own, and of emptiness, a full ripe vacuity of expression such as I saw on him at our last talk.

  
  
  

  After a while I added the word please, but if I was expecting anything to happen, nothing did, except that a sensation of longing oppressed me again, the desire for a still thing to move, for a dead thing to live, for my quiet painful heart to pump into my ears as loudly as Emily's weeping.

  
  
• 
  Tree

  Fantastic novel that gets to the heart of the question: What does it mean to believe or have faith?
  Everyone is in love with Jamie, but does Jamie really exist? This is the question that cynical realist Harry asks himself as he hovers over the bed of a boy whose existence escapes him. This is a novel that explores what it is like to believe in nothing but what you can see with your eyes.
  Beautiful prose, original storytelling: what's not to love?
• 
  Martin

  I enjoyed reading this odd book written in 1957. The book deals with faith and its leading character cannot see the dying boy, Jamie. I would like to say that if this book would have been written today, it would have been more explicit rather implicit, regarding homosexuality. Nontheless, a fascinating read and quite well written.
• 
  Larry-bob Roberts

  Surreal novel. The narrator is in love with Jamie, but is Jamie alive or dead? Or just sleeping?
• 
  Chris Horner

  see pages 196-198.