All for Love (Continents of Exile)

Despite that lush romance-novel title, Ved Mehta's account of his early love life proves to be an edgy, scrupulously frank tale of erotic misadventure. Commencing with the blind Indian-born author's arrival in 1960s New York after he lands a coveted job as a staff writer for The New Yorker, All for Love details Mehta's relationships with four women who seem to share a mission — tormenting him. The Jewish ballet dancer Gigi, the flighty Englishwoman Vanessa, his fellow Indian Lola, and the emotionally unstable Kilty all lure Mehta into periods of erotic intensity, only to dump him cruelly. Gigi, for instance, leaves him for an ex-lover after admitting that she could never commit to a non-Jew, and Vanessa chooses another man and devotion to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh over life with the author. Before long the reader might well wonder if Mehta isn't something of a glutton for punishment in his choice of lovers.

This would make for gloomy reading if it weren't for Mehta's wonderfully self-lacerating style and his gentlemanly refusal to blame these troubled women for his heartaches. Lola, who winds up running a chain of Denim Depot clothes stores in India, would have been an easy figure to ridicule, but Mehta instead depicts a confused, vibrant soul unwilling to lead the life of a writer's companion. Rather than taking revenge, the author turns his focus inward, admitting that what these women shared was not sadism but the illusory belief that Mehta's blindness would allow him to look beneath their skin and see some better selves within them. He is reluctantly helped toward this insight during a course of psychotherapy with the fractious, cigar-chomping Dr. Bak, who brutally reminds Mehta that "to love somebody the way you did, without regard for your own well-being, is a way of avoiding being loved." Although these therapy sessions, with their occasional lapses into Freudian banality, may lack the dramatic sparkle of the book's earlier sections, they do provide a fitting coda to Mehta's most unsentimental education.

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