Prose herself has always struck me as a cool writer who appeals more to the brain than the heart. Indeed, sometimes I've found her novels, accomplished as they are, to be somewhat too preoccupied with seminar questions about the nature of truth and identity. That philosophical detachment works in Prose's favor here: This story is so lurid that it needs to be toned down by some gray matter. Accordingly, she scatters provocative ruminations throughout the novel. The young Gabor, for instance, immerses himself in the sleazy glamour of Paris — as did Brassai. He takes photos of prostitutes, cabaret singers and criminals. But in the late '30s, when those photographs become celebrated as "art" in museum exhibitions, Gabor wonders about the temporal source of their higher value: "Could it be," he asks in a letter to his parents, "that everyone suddenly wants photographs of Paris because they fear that this eternally beautiful city may not be so eternal? What if Hitler isn't just bluffing?" Lionel Maine, the character modeled on Henry Miller, is also given to bouts of contemplation, but, happily, his are much raunchier in nature. Describing himself as "a sexual Columbus" he celebrates (with great anatomical specificity) the hedonism and variety of experience offered by pre-World War II Paris.
In tone and time period, voice and ideas, Lovers at the Chameleon Club tries itself to be something of a chameleon of a novel. Prose, I daresay, wants to consider the mystery of evil, embodied by the story of Lou Villars and her puzzling veer over to the dark side of history. But it's no knock on this novel to declare that it mostly reads as a good story and an ingenious excursion into the Parisian demimonde. Prose here concocts a bright confection — a light, but genuine pleasure.