Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What mattered was writing it: the act of words.

Beth began it in her Paris notebook. She let the words travel over the faces and bodies of Thad and Fred and over the window frame and the winged lambs beyond. To write about the abortion, about Thaddeus's desertion, wasn't difficult; what was difficult was writing about the happiness that had come before. But she knew she had to do it somehow. You couldn't ask readers to care about the loss of something unless you showed them what that something had been.

The story began in London, then moved to Rome instead of Paris. Jean and her American lover, Bradley, were loaned an apartment just outside the Vatican City. Their transgressive love with a third person, Michaela, took place within two blocks of one of the holiest places on earth. The ringing of St Peter's bells tolled upon their ecstasy. In the apartment below them lived a lowly priest, whose life became a torment. Beth worked hard upon the sexual agonies he suffered. She wanted everything about the book to be shocking and new.

Beth wrote every day. She thought her parents would nag her to find a job to replace her old one at the Harrods Gift Wrap counter, but they didn't. It seemed that if you were a writer, you could get away with doing nothing else. Other people would go out to work and come back and you would still be there, unmoving in your chair, and they would make your supper and wash it up and you would collapse onto the sofa to watch Juke Box Jury. They would place forgiving goodnight kisses on your agitated head.

The father sometimes asked questions about the book, but all Beth would say was, 'You're probably going to hate it. It's about a girl going crazy. It's about things you don't talk about at Verity Life.'

But this didn't seem to make him anxious. It made him smile a tolerant smile, as though he thought Beth had underestimated him. And one Saturday morning, he took Beth to a second-hand shop off Tottenham Court Road and helped her choose a typewriter, and paid for it in cash. It was an old industrial Adler with a body made of iron and a pleasing Pica typeface and a delicate bell that tinkled when the carriage reached the end of a line. After Beth set the Adler on her desk, she felt less alone.


A letter came from California.

Thaddeus had that childish, loopy writing many Americans seemed to think was adequate to a grown-up life and his powers of self-expression were weak.

When Beth saw that the letter began Dear Beth, she laid it aside for a while, knowing it was going to smite her with its indifference.

Later, she took it up again and read: I tried to tell you several times that I couldn't promise to stick around in London but I think you weren't listening. When you are my age, you will see. Money is important. I have to be a man of the world as well as a lover. Tricia has inherited her mother's house in Santa Monica. It's a nice beach-house, which I could never on my own afford. You would like it. And I can bathe in the ocean most days and forget about the cold of Europe. You will be OK. If you go to Paris, see Fred and tell her the Old American has gone back to the sun. Love, Thad.

Beth folded the letter into her notebook and went and lay down on her bed. She thought about the crocheted blanket that had covered them in Paris: the rich smell of it, which was both beautiful and tainted. She thought about the lens of Thaddeus's camera pointed at her body and the shutter opening and closing, opening and closing, gathering her further and further into a prison from which there was no exit.


There was only the book.

It was written in eleven weeks. Everything that Beth had experienced with Thaddeus was relived through Jean and Bradley. The slow, exquisite way a single orgasm was achieved sometimes took a page to describe. Fred/Michaela became a male-to-female transsexual with handsome white breasts. Bradley became a painter. His own genitals, both aroused and dormant, featured repetitively in his art. Jean was a beauty, with a mouth men tried to kiss in the street and tumbled blonde hair. She was Desire Absolute. Bradley and Michaela screamed and wept over her and sometimes lost all control and beat the floor, while the poor priest lay in his narrow bed beneath them and jabbered his Hail Marys as a penance for his own sexual incontinence.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.