Julian is the type of character whom everyone apparently loves — at least he seems to think so. Evidence to the contrary, he appears to be right. A tall, thin Armenian artist born in Paris, the 52-year-old (anti)hero in Vahé Berberian’s latest English-language novel, This is Not Love, is a self-described womanizer who also possesses a secret weapon in life. He can kill people by sheer willpower. Underneath his jovial appearance and his overactive libido, he’s kind of a menace to society, murdering others at will and leaving broken hearts strewn about.
This is not Berberian’s first novel: a polyglot born in Lebanon, he is one of the few writers in America equally at ease writing in both Western Armenian and English.
When this chatty novel with dark, humorous undertones first opens, Julian is happily smoking and drinking himself to death, while working as a successful painter and celebrity in LA’s insular Armenian community. Then one day there’s a knock at the door and in walks Kylie, the sexy 20-something daughter of his former wife, Lisa. She is also a painter in search of a mentor. At her insistence and against all his better instincts — he has a few — Julian takes her in as a charge and begins to tutor her. It’s hard not to place the novel within the context of the Me Too movement or be reminded of Woody Allen, who distastefully married his step-daughter.
Over the ensuing months, Julien parses out rules and advice to being a successful artist the way Julia Child might list ingredients in coq au vin. These extend to banal statements about eating habits (“Eat three times a day, not when you’re famished.”) and painting (“Always keep your paint brushes clean.”). Inevitably, Julian and Kylie seduce each other and end up shagging like teenagers. At times Julian also makes sweeping pronouncements, including the idea that Western Civilization exists only to satisfy men’s carnal urges and that only men, due to the differences in their genitalia, are creative. In 2025, you wonder why she lets this slide. Elsewhere Julian likens the creative process — and by extension life itself, to a distasteful bodily function: “The creative process… It’s painful. Painful and messy. It’s like thrusting your finger in your throat and throwing up…Life is like a banquet where you walk around tasting a sandwich here and an hors d’oeuvres there, and you drink and drink until your body can’t handle it anymore. So, you thrust your finger in your throat, and you throw up.”
Like many people, Julian has trouble controlling his own self-destructive urges, including when it comes to his former wife. Lisa is described as brilliant and intuitive, yet it takes her a rather long time to figure out that her former husband and her daughter are canoodling in bed. Similarly, when Julian invites Kylie to be part of the preparations for his Paris exhibition, he introduces her to his sexy nephew Shant, and then leaves them to go sauntering into the French night together. There are moments of clarity in this story from some of the novel’s minor characters, as when his friend Lucy, referring to Kylie, exclaims: “She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she can even be funny, but she’s a manipulative bitch.” Julian nicknames his student “Kyelig” or “little wolf” in Armenian, and indeed there’s a bit of a wolf to her predatory ways.
In a sense, This Is Not Love is a Bildungsroman of sorts, but the person receiving the emotional education is the 52-year-old Julian and not young Kylie. For part of the novel, she’s also dating a hot young blond guy named Jeff, who stands in direct competition to Julian. The reader wonders who, after all, is zooming whom though one realizes that the age and financial dynamics give all the power to Julian.
