Books: Eros Was a Greek

MIRI (219 pp.)—Peter Sourian—Pantheon ($3.50).

This is a tender and tempestuous first novel about first love. It is a triangle story of two boys (Lexy and Josh) in love with the same girl (Miri), and it is told in three first-person narratives in which each of the trio is mirrored in the eyes of the other.

Miri is a grave Greek girl with long black eyelashes and long brooding silences who goes to an eastern U.S. college. At a nearby school is her cousin Lexy—mercurial, unkempt, rude and life-intoxicated. Lexy’s roommate Josh is well-rooted in America but emotionally rootless, blond, bland and sweet-mannered. Lexy, who has run away from his unscrupulous shipowner father, is pursuing a hero image of himself. He is capable of madly egocentric flourishes, as when he bets an ear against $20 on the turn of a card. Josh, who sees college as a succession of merit badges to be won for his parents’ sake, is awed by such gestures. When Josh meets Miri, he is similarly drawn to her as an exotic, only to find that she is simpler and more straightforward than most American girls. The trio’s relationship comes to a head when Lexy decides to make peace with lis father, and invites Josh to join Miri and himself for a summer stay at the family’s New York country place. There Josh sees a half-enthralling, half-appalling sight, a patriarch in full possession of his powers, ordering women and children about as if that were the way man was meant to live. Lexy’s father confides to [osh his views of American family mores: ‘These parents, they live crazy, they divorce, they talk about being nice and they are not, and they make their children weak and bad, like sick things . My son, and my daughters, and little Miri, I want them to have as much happiness as they should have, not less, and they should not try to have more, because then they will have none.”

In such a setting, Josh seems to pale to transparency, while Lexy glows with a passion that finally ignites Miri. At novel’s end the cousins know that if they marry, it will be to each other. Only in this ending does Author Sourian, himself of Armenian descent, make an overt slip in his knowledgeable treatment of GreekAmerican customs, for consanguineous marriages up to the third cousin are regarded by the Orthodox Church as incest. At 24, Boston-born Peter Sourian is master of a style that is fresh, natural and ebullient. His characters define themselves in the language of the heart, not the tortured cliches of amateur psychologizing. With love and 20-20 vision, Author Sourian has made the season’s most appealing U.S. fiction debut.