At the beginning of Alba Arikha’s new novel, Two Hours, our 16-year-old narrator Clara has just moved from Paris to Manhattan after her father gets a job teaching at Columbia. It’s the mid-Eighties and she is not at all happy about the change, even though the family are staying in the plush Park Avenue apartment of her father’s much wealthier friend, Andre Karlick, an art dealer. Karlick has a 16-year-old son, Alexander, who is literary, pretentious, and very good-looking, and on whom Clara, perhaps inevitably, forms an instant crush. She is very droll about this, aware of herself as striking a love-struck teenage pose even while incapable of doing anything else. “I cannot admit my ignorance,” she confides in the reader, as Alexander flaunts his love for Dostoevsky. “I must find a way of shifting the conversation. What about Jane Austen, I venture timidly?”
This lightning-bolt strike of infatuation will become a defining streak in Clara’s life, an exemplar of the way we so often live in the shadow of what might have been, even when that shadow so often comprises baseless fantasy. Alexander moves to London, from where he sends Clara a single postcard (which she pores over obsessively, convinced it contains a conclusive declaration of everlasting love). And then they drift apart, until another pivotal encounter in her twenties in New York’s Soho sets her feelings in motion once again. And yet she marries someone else, has two children, and moves to London herself. Many years later will come a third exchange of sorts; it’s a measure of Arikha’s skill that the “will-they-won’t-they” subtext of this otherwise distinctly literary novel is as thrilling as any romance.
