Love in the Time of Cholera

In the late 19th century, three Frenchmen are dispatched to Egypt to track down a killer disease.

AN IMPERFECT LENS

A Novel

By Anne Roiphe

Shaye Areheart. 296 pp. $25

Fearlessness has always been one of the most attractive features of Anne Roiphe's career. Her eight previous novels each ventured into territory new to her, from Up the Sandbox! (1970), with its feminist wish-fulfillment fantasies, to The Pursuit of Happiness (1991), a wide-ranging generational saga; from musings about religious ambivalence in Lovingkindness (1987) to the subtleties of a middle-aged love affair in If You Knew Me (1993).

Roiphe's newest novel again shows off her adventurous spirit. Set in 1883 during a cholera epidemic in Alexandria, Egypt, the tale follows a team of three French scientists who are dispatched to that distant city by an aging Louis Pasteur to isolate the cholera microbe. The exotic locale and the mix of historical fact and fabrication are characteristically bold choices for Roiphe, not to mention the certainty that this 19th-century health crisis will provoke reminders of the nightmare plagues -- AIDS, bird flu -- of our own day.

Arriving in Alexandria, Roiphe's three Frenchmen encounter a vibrant, filthy port city, bustling with commerce stimulated by ships carrying textiles and spices -- as well as disease. Despite the current epidemic, business is brisk: "We are alarmed, but not yet panicked," declares Dr. Malina, the community's most prominent physician. The French scientists get to work immediately, injecting local animals with cholera in an attempt to grow the virus. More is at stake for these men than merely saving lives: They are also engaged in a nationalistic race against a renowned German doctor, recently credited with discovering the cause of tuberculosis and now conducting similar experiments in Alexandria.

Further heightening the drama is a romance that blooms between 27-year-old Louis Thuillier, the French team's youngest member, and Este Malina, the beautiful daughter of the town's distinguished Jewish doctor, whose family has thrived in Alexandria for more than 300 years. Este becomes enthralled with Louis and his work and sets about making herself useful in the laboratory, eventually hatching a plan to marry the scientist and accompany him back to France as his assistant.

Much stands in the way of Este's dream, however, including the inconvenient fact of her engagement to a banker. Another serious complication arises when the Malina family is accused of spying by British authorities, who recently took control of the government from the French. Eager to shore up their shaky new hold on the city, the anti-Semitic colonial bureaucrats make easy pawns of the Malinas, throwing the doctor in jail on false charges and threatening to exile his family from Egypt.

Roiphe has chosen to weave her tale out of three narrative strands -- a thriller, a love story and a meditation on the nature of disease -- each of which ought to be effective. Yet the thriller element, which unfolds as a sort of 19th-century "CSI" episode, lacks momentum: The Frenchmen spend most of the book failing to find the germ. Similarly, the romance between Louis and Este is a stiff and formal affair, too tastefully executed to suggest much hectic passion between them.

If Roiphe's story of love in the time of cholera lacks convincing romance, it also -- rather unexpectedly -- lacks sufficient cholera. While Roiphe does provide graphic descriptions of illness and death all around Alexandria, those deaths are all incidental. It's not until the book's final pages that a main character succumbs to the disease, whereupon it is nearly too late for the reader to connect emotionally to its horrors. As Roiphe herself points out, "Large numbers of bodies are in many ways far less upsetting than a single corpse. . . . We are capable of mourning only one by one, and a mass grave leaves as light a touch on our hearts as none at all."

In these and many other reflections on epidemics and their consequences, Roiphe rescues the narrative from its flaws. She mentions in an author's note that she was inspired to write this book in honor of her brother, a hematologist who died of AIDS. One cannot help being moved by her personal connection to the story when reading those passages about the precariousness of health and the stealth of disease, which are by far the book's most eloquent parts, and which make An Imperfect Lens , despite its imperfections, a historical novel with a strikingly contemporary sensibility. ·

Donna Rifkind is a regular contributor to Book World.