‘I Make Envy On Your Disco’ is a radiant rediscovery of Germany’s capital—and your authentic self.
By James Long
A few weeks after graduating from college, I worked as a production assistant for a Broadway-bound play, A Meeting By The River, by the eminent British-American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood and his long-time partner, acclaimed artist Don Bachardy. The play, newly adapted from Isherwood’s 1967 novel of the same name, united renowned Broadway producers, a Tony Award-winning director and a star-studded cast—but would ultimately be eviscerated by the Broadway critics and close after opening night.
Although the Palace Theatre’s lights went dark with a humiliating and financial finality, among the memories that have never dimmed for me are the occasions when I hobnobbed with Isherwood and Bachardy. After rehearsals, I’d sometimes accompany Chris and Don—and maybe one or two other famished cast members—for a casual bite where conversation would inevitably turn to the state of rehearsals, arguments with the director and stars over rewrites (there were many) and other complications that predictably arise when producing a new play.
After dinner, however, with my youthful vigor yet unspoiled, I’d coax Chris and Don into joining other cast and crew late-night habitués at a nearby gay club, where center stage meant an illuminated dance floor under a de rigueur disco ball. Upon arriving, in no time I’d find myself dancing to Donna Summer’s transformative “I Feel Love” with the author of The Berlin Stories, one of the 20th century’s seminal literary works. Comprising two novels, Isherwood’s second volume, Goodbye To Berlin, introduced readers to the fictional character of Sally Bowles and, in due course, inspired the hit Broadway musical and film, Cabaret.
And so, upon recently receiving an advanced copy of Salisbury, CT homeowner—and Tony Award-winning producer—Eric Schnall’s debut novel, I Make Envy On Your Disco (University of Nebraska Press), with its cover blurb, “A love letter to Berlin…,” penned by none other than Cabaret Best Actor Tony Award-winner Alan Cumming, who happened to be featured on the (then) current cover of The Mountains, well, let’s just say my memory was pelted with Proustian force. Fate had landed in my inbox in full regalia.
Set in 2003, more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall—and mercifully before the iPhone—I Make Envy On Your Disco’s reunified German capital is still in its cultural renaissance infancy. Sam Singer, an über-ambivalent 37-year-old New York City art advisor to the well-heeled, is on a brief business trip from his Upper West Side home—and from Daniel, his meticulous architect partner—to appraise Berlin’s flourishing art scene, in particular, the opening of “immediate/present,” an avant-garde exhibition with the theme of Ostalgie, “a fusion of Ost (meaning east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia), the desire to remember and understand the irretrievable past.”
Soon after Singer checks in to his Mitte-borough hotel—itself, a fusion of three-star necessities and hilarity—like any first-time foreign visitor having to orient himself spatially and gastronomically to a new country (spoiler alert for Gen Z-ers, that’s without GPS or Yelp), he seeks local guidance from the hotel’s cold-blooded young manager, or as Tolstoy might describe her, the “legitimately peculiar” Magda, to little avail.
Potentially offering a less dismissive assist, Singer phones Jeremy, the discontented 24-year-old nephew of an art client and nine-month transplanted New Yorker, whom he agreed to connect with while in Berlin. Upon their meeting, Jeremy shepherds Singer through October’s cold and drizzly Berlin neighborhoods by day and its hotbed of nightclubs and eateries seemingly springing up overnight, where cigarettes, a bit of ecstasy and corrective insights into Germany’s highly-inflected language are subsidized along the way.
In truth, with Sam as Hebrew’s chapter 4 to Jeremy’s verse 13, nothing in all Berlin’s creation is hidden, everything is uncovered and laid bare—its patrons and artists, laborers and creatives. From tram-boarding “space-age ladies in ski boots and Russian fur-caps dispersing like a pack of startled birds” to “faux-hawked men zipping by on their bicycles,” nothing escapes Sam’s (and gloriously observed Schnall’s) eyes, most notably, a beautiful goth club bartender named Kaspar, “his perfect little butt, his endless legs” galvanizing Sam, yet another token of Berlin’s pervading sense of possibility. And yet, Sam tells Jeremy, “There’s this stillness. There is something else… And I know that I’m traveling, which makes everything feel different. But this time it is different. In New York, my entire life is on vibrate.”
I Make Envy On Your Disco’s intimate, journal-like chronicle (recalling to mind William Boyd’s masterful Any Human Heart) is a dazzling—and often delicious—Berlin story for our time. A love letter, indeed, though permit me to extend Cumming’s truncated analogy. Schnall’s exuberant and fervent journey of rediscovery is the letter you wrote to your first love, when that initial attraction and the intense emotions fueled your desire and heightened your every sensation, the rush you felt for the newly discovered.
Still, like any first love, making sense of new feelings can be scary with its inevitable twists and turns, more so for Sam Singer and his feeling that he’s getting older, that his first love with partner Daniel has become all too familiar and their lives together routine. It’s the discreet shadow cast throughout Schnall’s novel—and perhaps our own lives—much like the shadow cast by Berlin’s ever-present TV Tower, the tallest structure in Germany, always in view throughout Schnall’s story, an allegorical archangel, the judger of souls—and soulmates—forever contemplating Berlin, its uneasy history and reunification, its denizens, deceits and desires. Only for Sam Singer, as he continues on his journey, hypnotized by the illuminated disco ball in the sky, it’s his lights that are flickering.
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