Having come to New York in the 1930s, a refugee from Austria, Leo Kellermann [in In Search of Love and Beauty] establishes himself as a 'psycho-spiritual therapist': a Bacchus figure in a monk's robe 'girdled by a studded cowboy belt'. Aside from collecting the pupils and disciples he collects, he is also the pivot around which turn the lives of three generations (the story spans half a century) of an émigré New York family whose matriarch, Louise, 'adopted' him when he first arrived in the States.
Leo is neither the first 'guru' to feature in Prawer Jhabvala's fiction, nor is he the only one in In Search of Love and Beauty. Louise's daughter, Marietta, resentful of Leo's hold on her family, tours the ashrams of India in a desultory quest for the more traditional variety. And this, of course, is the novel's subject—that structureless, restless, enervated, peculiarly Western search for the Meaning of Life. Marietta sometimes pursues it through her passionate love for her son; or in promiscuous sexual relations with middle-class Indian boys. Her son, for his part, looks for it in a quasi-sadomasochistic involvement with a 'wholesome, Anglo-Saxon' stud called Kent. Her mother, Louise, has her complex devotion to Leo; while her mother's friend Regi trawls the world for face lifts, excitement and servile young men.
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