Luminosity

Geoff Hamilton is a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Luminosity is the first novel by the creative duo Frank and Gillian
McEnaney. Sprawling and ambitious, it tells the story of two young men,
Breetz and Richard, whose lives are altered in 1960 by their discovery
of a startling, magical, and, indeed, luminous quality in a girl named
Katlyn. Obsessed by what cultural critic Naomi Wolf has loudly decried
as “the beauty myth,” Breetz becomes a fashion photographer, forever
in search of whatever it was that made Marilyn Monroe so photogenic.
Richard, the bland rich kid who narrates much of the book, toys with
Ph.D. studies in Romantic literature and then turns to the paranormal as
he embarks on his own quixotic search for luminosity. The questing of
both men takes us globetrotting through the 1960s and 1970s, including a
road trip across Canada (as Richard helps Katlyn escape her luminous
endowment), and stops in Russia, Northern Africa, and Tibet.

As the adventures unfold, the “star quality,” “life force,” or
“luminous beauty” everybody is chasing or fleeing emerges as the
book’s real protagonist, gleaming here and there in various guises. In
the grip of their obsessions, Breetz and Richard are themselves
strangely dull, preferring to look and think (often without much
perception), not touch and feel. They are voyeurs, but lacking blood
they are largely subordinated to their storytellers’ ideas about
voyeurism. This makes for an ultimately sterile narrative from which the
lively interweaving of plot strands can only momentarily distract us.
Things move along, but to little effect.

Nevertheless, this work is at times genuinely thought-provoking and
certainly of-the-moment in its preoccupation with the mesmerizing power
of the image, and the pervasiveness and perniciousness of media
distortion. It convincingly skewers the meretricious spirit of the
fashion scene, the apotheosis of the model’s aura, while promoting the
kind of mystic transcendence into luminosity cultivated by Tibetan holy
men. If that idea interests you, so perhaps will the novel.