On Dan Callahan’s novel That Was Something

I just finished my friend Dan Callahan’s first novel, That Was Something. It is Dan’s fourth book. His first book was Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, part of the Hollywood Legends series. His second book was Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave (I interviewed him about it for Ebert.) His third book, which also came out this year, is The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960, which is so fantastic – nobody writes about actors like Dan Callahan. He is at the top of a very short list of writers/film critics who understand the craft and know how to talk about it. I interviewed Dan about that book too. Dan and I are friends and he has been trying to get his novel published for a couple of years. When the news finally broke that he found a publisher, you could hear the screams of congratulations from his friends in every New York borough (and those of us across the Hudson). This was a project close to Dan’s heart (although everything he does is close to his heart, part of his unique quality as a writer), and it was so meaningful that his novel had finally found a home. Equally as exciting, Dan was just interviewed by The Paris Review about the book. Very happy for and proud of my friend!

Bobby Quinn is the narrator of That Was Something, a transplant to New York from the Midwest, a college student in the mid-to-late 1990s, a closeted kid, in love with movies. He befriends a straight guy in his dorm named Ben Morrissey. It’s an intense relationship. Dan understands the complexities that can be at work in the all-too-rare straight-gay-male relationship, the sexual tension that exists, and that can be okay with a certain kind of straight guy who’s not afraid of it, who plays around with it even. This is not a tear-stained story, though, about tragic unrequited love (although the entire book is filled with a sort of melancholy yearning). It’s written with retrospective in play. Bobby is clearly much older as he’s writing, and looking back on that brief era – the 5 or 6 year pre-9/11 – with a kind of awe and wonder, at the intensity of it, the playfulness and magic, the newness of New York, its possibilities. Ben and Bobby end up in the orbit of a fascinating girl named Monica Lilac, a silent film obsessive, who throws elaborate parties where no one is allowed to speak, or where everyone has to come dressed up as either Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Monica and Ben are drawn to one another, and Bobby looks on, amazed, as these two powerful erotic muses (my own term) – two people he loves – hook up and sink into another kind of intimacy. He, meanwhile, is on his own trajectory, exploring the gay nightlife, liberating himself from the closet, having all kinds of adventures, some good, some awful. It’s a book about people who care about art: photographs, actors, literature, film.

That Was Something is beautiful and melancholy and bittersweet and very sexy. It captures so perfectly not only that time of life – mid20s, artists in New York – but also that era … the moment riiiiight before everyone picked up their cellphones, never to put them down again. An era where you looked at people and had to listen to them. It made my heart ache. It made me laugh! Why not? Nevertheless! Whatever! (Those three phrases are significant in the book, running through it like a subliminal theme.)

Callahan has created characters that live and his love for them is so clear. Dan writes from love – love that is almost indistinguishable from awe. He looks upon those he loves, at the mere FACT of love, and thinks, “My God, isn’t this interesting. Isn’t this an amazing experience? Look what happened on this one special night. I will never forget it. Isn’t it extraordinary that we did this that one time? How did we even bear it?” He understands how rare it is to connect with another human being. He also understands how rare silliness is, and how silliness is one of the most precious qualities of all. If you can’t be silly with someone, what’s the point? But the tone of the book is somewhat distanced, Bobby Quinn is older now, looking back on events, with the knowledge that love, connection, silliness, magic … is harder as you get older. People retract. Retreat. You lose the capacity for that kind of thing. (Which reminds me of my own thought that you might as well feel things as strongly as you can while you’re young. Because age does a number on us all.)

I knew someone like Ben Morrissey. And he really was “all that.” Other girls thought he was a user, a player. But I saw the truth. And I benefited so much from seeing him for who he was. And he did the same with me, by the way. It took me years to really get how clearly he saw me. Because I was WILD then. (Then?) Not too many men could deal with me. He did. Because he saw the reality of me, and he saw it early. (I did not know this until much much later, a decade and a half later, when he told me about his first impressions.) On my first “date” with “my” Ben Morrissey, I lay my head on his chest and listened to his heart beat and had such a strong reaction to it I babbled to my friends about it the next day. I wrote a 10 page journal entry about that heart beat. I felt connected to that heart beat and I had just met the man. Cuckoo! I was like a duck imprinting herself on her “mate”. BUT. I was not WRONG in what I sensed, and I was not wrong in my intuition that we somehow “had something to do with each other.” That that heartbeat had something to do with me. The ravings of an intense GenX 20something? You bet. But I repeat: I was not wrong. It wasn’t “love”. It was something else.

I over-identified maybe with the character of Ben Morrissey and Bobby’s reaction to him, but that was the strength of Dan’s character development and behavioral observations.

Dan’s book made me think of that whole madcap screwball season in my life … when adulthood had started but nothing had been decided yet.

But the heart knows stuff. If you’re open it finds “your people” for you.

I will miss these characters. I miss that New York too. That Was Something called it all back.