When the object of your love is a film critic rather than a film, however, that danger is real, and that is the danger that Craig Seligman faces but never confesses in his book Sontag & Kael.  Seligman is a great lover of Pauline Kael, the once-formidable film critic for the New Yorker who retired in 1991 and died a decade later, but while Kael and her criticism will always be important to those who knew her, as Seligman did, and those who read it as part of their introduction to film as a form, her influence will continue to wane as the years pass and those who knew her and can extol her pass into history.   Kael may have been the most influential movie critic that ever lived but that is a relatively minor accolade since movie critics just aren’t that influential.

What galls Seligman is how much more respect Susan Sontag gets than Kael.  Sontag, almost everyone agrees, will be read for some time and remain one of the great critical voices of this age.  She will be read and admired, if seldom loved, for generations.  While this assessment could turn out to be wrong, Seligman simply can’t understand or abide the disparity between Sontag’s stature and Kael’s.  This book is his attempt to rectify this disparity, and he tries to accomplish it as much by tearing Sontag down as he does by raising Kael up.

The book is organized into four lengthy sections, two of which primarily focus on Sontag and two primarily on Kael, with each section making forays into the opposite character for effect and comparison.  How he chooses to compare them makes his project clear:  he compares Sontag to Kael when he wants to show how strident, joyless, or lacking in sympathy Sontag is, but he compares Kael to Sontag when he he wants to show how Kael is every bit as engaged or accomplished as Sontag.  He uses Kael to make Sontag look bad, but uses Sontag to illuminate and elevate Kael.

At the books midpoint, just before he turns his primary focus away from Sontag and toward Kael, he quotes one of his early readers in an attempt to shut off and prevent this line of criticism.  He friend asked, “Why are you devoting half your book to a writer you hate?” and it’s a good question because it gets at the hidden, probably unconscious, agenda of the book.  Seligman protests that he doesn’t hate Sontag, and I believe him, but he never asks himself why he would write about her so unsympathetically.  He thinks she’s just exasperating so that’s enough.

Sontag is universally admired and respected if never loved (and seldom even liked), while Kael is much beloved by all who know her if often dismissed as mere reviewer by the wider culture.  The question raised by his first reader, and that likely will occur to all readers, can be answered simply by noting this fact and appreciating how devastating it is for Seligman, who so loves his Pauline.

I’ve read other books that reward a reader in the same way as this one, bringing with it a powerful sense of grace and contentment: John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet and Frederic Tuten’s The Green Hour both come to immediate mind.  The thing these books all share is a true love for their subject matter, for the material of which they are composed (rather than for the ideas that animate them).  Berger writes about Portugal (and to a lesser extent his mother) with a loving tenderness while Tuten writes about art and a boy very like his godson with evident and equal ardor.  These are the qualities that Ben Jelloun brings to The Last Friend: tenderness, awe, respect, longing; in short, love.

This love for one’s material is what makes for the most rewarding stories (although not necessarily the greatest—none of the books I mentioned are great in the normal sense of that term).  More than writing what you know, as so many guidebooks suggest you do, I suggest that you write what you love, whatever or whomever that might be.

Ben Jelloun, though, refuses to clearly answer any such question.  Instead, his story offers a polyphony of voices, that of both Ali and Mahmoud as well as their mutual friend who serves as an intermediary when their relationship sours.  For you see, their relationship goes through a number of difficult periods, when petty jealousies and misunderstandings and spousal pique prevents the men from sharing their lives in any but the most superficial of ways.  And yet they find their friendship to still be pure in shape and character.

They believe in this relationship until the end, even after it has fallen away, because it has fallen away in order to maintain its purity.  As I read this story last week, I wondered how these men could hold on so long to their friendship, to their relationship.  If anything can remain pure, it is friendship.

But my own life seems to be characterized by impurity, an ever-widening sphere of compromise, disappointment, and betrayal.  My life began in betrayal and, I fear, will end in it, betrayal of loved ones, of oneself, of one’s values and principles.  How do we live, survive, in a compromised world?

Ben Jelloun, though, offers solace, for his characters are just as imperfect, just as compromised and impure as we.  They continue, nevertheless, to believe not in the possibility of purity in their lives, in themselves, in their relationships, but in the reality of good enough, perfectly good enough.  The friendship between Ali and Mahmoud, despite all its tribulations remains not simply good, in their eyes, but exactly enough for each of them, serving them to the unavoidable, inevitable end.