One day, eavesdropping on a phone call, Harold Raab, a writer with nothing to write, hears his roommate refer intriguingly to a woman Harold has never met. Curiosity leads to obsession and to an affair with the married Charlotte Cobin, all of which Harold faithfully records in the notebook that becomes his deeper obsession. As the relationship with Charlotte complicates and darkens, Harold's poisons emerge. He's discovered a subject he can write about, but now reveals himself as someone whose intelligence, wit, and sexual delirium mask a terror of human connection. Adrift in the ruins of 1970s Berkeley, he is disastrously unprepared for actual love, and even for life.
A mature work, a novel about people coming to terms with the end of the collective mania of Berkeley in the Sixties as much as it is about sex and violence. It’s mordant, dark, and funny, written with an eye for the telling detail, through which an entire personality unfurls itself before our eyes, fully formed. It is disturbing and unsettling in the way of great writing. It even has a plot ... It’s a disturbing enough premise...but the grimness of it is leavened by Harold’s charm. He’s funny and beguiling ... Complaints notwithstanding, the book is remarkable. It manages an acute realism even as the artifice of Harold’s notebook—the way that his entries seem at times to give rise to the action of the book as much as to depict it—functions as a meta-commentary on 'the disease of narrative.'
Bean writes erotic scenes with a frankness and gusto uncommon in literary fiction today ... Returns as a chronicle of sex and death in youth and a portrait of the baby boom generation at a turning point — between political radicalism and the path of temptation, fulfillment and disappointment that came to define it.
Our first masterpiece this decade—and it was written in 1982 ... Ruthlessly brilliant ... Reading The Nenoquich is like being plugged into unheeded Delphic promise, into unconscionable talent. Bean’s sentences approach the speed of light without any loss of iridescent precision.
