The correspondence

Alex Merry, star of stage and screen, died a tragic and untimely death in 1988. Clearly, no one would be better suited to write his biography than George Fowler, his long-time friend. Fowler might be an avant-garde writer known only in literary circles, but who knew Merry better than he? Fowler's account, however, is no standard biography. Of course he writes about all the women who passed through Alex's tumultuous love life, and his rise to fame. But we also learn about George Fowler and his own struggle as a writer. And in the course of the telling, we discover more and more about the complex, intimate relationship between George and Alex - a relationship that speaks movingly about the true nature of friendship, of love, and their consequences. Intertwined in the narrative is the fictitious correspondence which the two friends kept up for over twenty years, playfully recasting the facts of their lives as coded truths. In the letters, Alex plays the self-important adventurer, while in real life the former philanderer falls tragically in love. George takes on the bitingly satirical persona of an alienated poet, tormented by solitude and the failure of creativity. During the course of the novel the characters' motives are progressively unmasked, and the reader is led to consider just how much we can ever know about one another, or about ourselves. Heartbreaking, but also hilariously funny, The Correspondence is a brilliant portrayal of obsession, the peculiarities of romantic and sexual attraction, and the madness of love, written by a masterful and remarkably inventive storyteller.