OPEN, HEAVEN, by Sean Hewitt
“Open, Heaven,” the first novel by the poet and memoirist Sean Hewitt, begins with an epigraph from William Blake’s poem “Milton”: “every Flower/The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wall-flower, the Carnation,/The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree/And Flower & Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,/Yet all in order sweet & lovely, Men are sick with Love.” It’s a fitting start. This is a novel that has, line for line, more descriptions of flowers than any I can remember reading, and that has as its all-consuming preoccupation the delusion and disorder that abject desire can cause.
Most of the novel takes place around 2002, when the narrator, James, is 16. He lives with his family in Thornmere, a village in northern England that seems either quaintly charming or suffocatingly bleak, depending on one’s sensibility and affinity for cows. James feels like an “interloper” there. He’s gay and has recently come out. His parents are somewhat supportive, in their mild, perplexed way, though around town the news has been met with chilly silence or disgust.
Then James meets Luke, a 17-year-old who arrives to live with his aunt and uncle for a year. His origins are murky — a mother somewhere in France, a father in prison. He becomes James’s obsession, a blank canvas onto which James can project his. unfulfilled desires. Luke is charismatic and cocksure, casually fluent in the arcane codes governing the lives of straight teenage boys. His sexuality remains maddeningly ambiguous, even as he and James become best friends. James slowly falls in love with Luke, and he grows increasingly desperate to know if his feelings are reciprocated. He fears his desire is a betrayal: “I was hardly a friend to him at all, only an opportunist, trying to get close to him so I could convince him to love me.”
The inchoate pain of asymmetrical love, the twin currents of need and shame that flow beneath the surface of desire — these are familiar topics for Hewitt, whose 2022 memoir, “All Down Darkness Wide,” was widely praised as a wrenching portrait of a doomed relationship. But where the memoir was piercing and profound, “Open, Heaven” clings insistently to the superficial. Hewitt has a fondness for lyrical description, particularly of the natural world (“the flowers from afar looked like a pure white froth … a bright sky-blue blanket of forget-me-nots was ruched in the dappled light…”). These passages effectively stir up an aura of misty poignancy, but they are deployed with such frequency and at such cloying length that at times it seems like Hewitt’s goal is merely to conjure an exquisite atmosphere, rather than to understand these characters or to imbue their story with any emotional weight.
While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, it never gives these boys any sense of particularity; we don’t know what draws them to each other. This is the problem with unrelenting rapture: It can become generic and impersonal, even solipsistic. “It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon,” Hewitt writes, “the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness of the flowers, the boy I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees.”
This is sentimental without communicating actual sentiment, airy without ever taking flight. James is enthralled by his fantasy of Luke’s hidden depths — “beneath the blush of his cheeks, I imagined an ocean of thought” — but we get no notion of what those depths might contain, nor even what James might think they contain. “When [Luke] was alone, inside himself, he was pure, golden,” James concludes. “He was like a statue of beauty to me, considered and perfectly made.” A statue may be enough to satisfy adolescent curiosity. But it’s not enough for a novel.
OPEN, HEAVEN | By Sean Hewitt | Knopf | 207 pp. | $28
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