subtlebodiesI was won over by Subtle Bodies early and what did it was the elf shoes. Nina is enroute to upstate New York from her home in San Francisco. Her husband Ned is on the trek ahead of her and has already arrived at a threadbare location in the Catskills.

Why didn’t they go together? That’s coming up. Nina is frustrated because the early-into-middle-age couple are trying to have a child and this is the perfect time for them to have a chance to conceive. Instead they are thousands of miles apart.

Ned had heard that his great friend, Douglas, was dead, dying way before his time in a freak accident on his motorized mower. The mower careened over a ravine at Douglas and Iva’s weird but lavish compound up in the mountains. It’s called a “compound” because there’s more than one building on the property: a main residence, a cabin for their sometimes feral teenage son, Hume, and a wide tower. Douglas’ family seems eccentric enough to be English and reminds me of one of those offbeat families you can find in an old Iris Murdoch novel like The Philosopher’s Pupil.

Let’s go back to the 1970’s. (please). Ned has bonded with a pack of student friends at NYU. Douglas is their leader. The friendships of the group last a lifetime despite some strains as the guys’ temperaments pull them apart. There’s even a mind-arresting beautiful girlfriend, Claire, who’d been passed down from Douglas to Ned, although Ned didn’t realize he had “inherited” her.

Norman Rush does a smack down great job showing what friendships among undergraduates are like. Douglas is team leader. The clannish guys trademark dumb jokes which they can shout to strangers on the street. Looking back on this cult of bromance in his maturity, Ned realizes that Douglas and their group really weren’t that hip or that bright…but they thought that they were! Isn’t that as good a definition of your youth as any?

Upon Douglas’ fatal accident, Ned is summoned to the upstate New York compound immediately. Douglas’ glamorous and come-thither wife Iva is planning a media-attended memorial service. Ned, as a senior friend, will make a contribution to the service. Douglas apparently had some left-wing, continental fame as an authenticator of historical documents and writer of semi-radical essays.

So the great friends of their NYU youth will gather in the Catskills at the smoldering hearth of their old leader of the pack. They’ve all changed, matured, ripened and been despoiled by the mercury of time.

Gruen, the youngest, has gained weight and is embarrassingly ovoid. Joris, the reality-oriented engineer, has grown more conservative than the rest of the group. Elliot is busy seeing reporters and riding herd over everyone else. Ned, who’s returned to the fold like a leeming…okay a thoughtful leeming…is mourning the lost hero worship of his old friend, seeing him more clearly with adult eyes.

As for Nina, trailing behind her husband’s bereavement. she wishes that Ned would realize that she’s his best friend. Nina has never meet “the guys” but is looking forward to the encounter, and her encounter with Iva, maintaining a skeptical balance mixed with total loyalty to her husband’s more enlightened interests. And remember Ned and Nina are trying to have a child.

I haven’t forgotten about the elf shoes. Nina enroute is musing about those elf shoes her Mom once bought her. (Were they on sale?) Thinking about the gall her mother had, telling Nina that she should wear the elf shoes to school.

I thought about that…how gullible kids can or cannot be. If I were say, seven years old, and my mother told me I could wear elf shoes to school, would I have believed her? I’d like to think not. But we accept a lot of what we are told when we’re younger.

That’s in part what Subtle Bodies is about. In the early nineteenth century, at the height of the romantic era, you could have said “soul” and been widely accepted. Maybe in our 21st century different terms are required.

But what Rush seems to mean….it’s so delicate…is that inner quality of impulse and idea that makes you who you are. It’s a feature of selfhood that’s maybe hard to discern when you’re older and been knocked around a bit.

It’s easier to detect when you’re a callow NYU undergrad hanging out with your friends, when maybe your heart is more likely to show on your face. And it still shines bright in Nina and Ned’s loving marriage. Subtle Bodies is available now from Alfred A. Knopf.