James Purdy: Where to Start?

 

After posting my thoughts on Michael Snyder's new biography of James Purdy, I got questions from friends who were interested in this writer they had never heard of and wondered where to start. Here, then, some quick recommendations...

First, I don't think you can really go terribly wrong by just picking up whatever work by Purdy happens to be most easily available to you. He had plenty of range as a writer — more than he is often given credit for — but though I have not quite read all the novels, I have yet to feel there's a big range in quality there, with some novels great highs and others terrible lows (I think the range of quality in his short stories is bigger, as well as his plays; I have not read enough of his poetry to judge that yet). This makes recommendations easy, because if you like one Purdy novel, you will probably like them all to some extent, and if you dislike one Purdy novel, there's a very good chance he is not a writer for you — though it's also probably worth trying one more, just in case.

Nonetheless, there are ways to begin exploring Purdy's work that may be more likely to help you appreciate him. A lot of that, though, depends on your own tastes and expectations.

If you like short stories, definitely start with the short stories. They are conveniently all collected in one beautiful, big book. If you read no other stories by Purdy, read "Brawith" — I know of nothing else like it, the kind of story we might get if Flannery O'Connor dropped acid. The Collected Stories volume is fine to wander around in, though. There are some clunkers, but they tend to be short, for though he wrote some brilliant brief stories, the primary weakness in the weakest of Purdy's stories is underdevelopment. I can't think of a story over ten or fifteen pages that disappointed me.

If you prefer longer work to short stories, there are plenty of choices. Daniel Green's survey of the novels is a good guide. Here are a few paths and categories of my own:

 


Chronological:
Purdy's work developed in interesting ways, and his first novel, Malcolm, made his name. It also offers many of the themes, motifs, and character types that would carry through his next decade of writing, and, in many cases, throughout his whole career. 

Even though it was for much of the world a successful introduction to Purdy, I don't generally recommend Malcolm as a starting place because of my own experience. It was the first book of Purdy's I owned, bought in New York (probably at The Strand, I don't remember) when I was in college and obsessed with the plays of Edward Albee. Because Albee had adapted the novel, I thought I should read it. I bounced off it again and again, just completely unable to find a way to make it come alive in my mind. This was probably because I was a silly college student, and since you are probably not a silly college student it may work for you.

After Malcolm, the next three books expand and develop Purdy's range in ways that will become familiar — a deceptively gentle, pastoral tale in The Nephew (think Our Town meets Hairspray); the unhinged satire of Cabot Wright Begins; and the coming together of all of Purdy's interests and talents in Eustace Chisholm and the Works. After that, there are the further developments of the 1970s, where Purdy didn't ever quite leave behind the interests and style of those first four novels, but expanded in interesting ways.

 


Extremes:
For certain readers, I love recommending Narrow Rooms first, a kind of gothic horror novel that is not exactly gothic and not exactly horror but nonetheless not for the faint of heart. This book is pure essence of Jacobean tragedy. It's probably my favorite Purdy novel, and certainly the one that made me a lifelong fan. The fewer expectations you bring to it, the better, so I won't say much except that it isn't like any other novel I know. It is also the only novel I remember immediately rereading upon finishing it, because I had started it knowing virtually nothing about it and so did not have any idea where it was taking me; once I got there, I wanted to go back and retrace the steps. If you enjoy that extremity, then you also need to read Eustace Chisholm and the Works, In a Shallow Grave, I Am Elijah Thrush, and maybe even Cabot Wright Begins.

There's a different type of extremity in Garments the Living Wear and Out with the Stars, both of which have a certain preciousness to their design, like demented chamber music. I think it's uncontroversial to say these are minor novels in Purdy's oeuvre, novels that more vividly than any of his others show the influence of Ronald Firbank, but they are not uninteresting, particularly if, for instance, you are interested in Purdy's take on AIDS (Garments), which killed many of his friends; or are interested in an undisguised roman à clef about the composer Virgil Thompson (Out with the Stars). Out with the Stars got an uncomprehending, lazy review from John Weir in the NY Times (Weir, himself a fine writer, was too deep into his own activism and AIDS losses at the time for a novel like Out with the Stars to seem to him anything better than irrelevant. It is interesting to note that Fordham University Press has just re-released the book ... and they recently re-released Weir's two novels), but it got a perceptive (positive) review by Irving Malin in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, wherein Malin compared it to James McCourt's Time Remaining and said, "Surely McCourt has learned from Purdy; both writers are 'operatic,' extreme, and uncanny. Purdy has always been attacked as a camp writer. He is, ironically, a religious artist who recognizes that his words­ — perhaps all art — will never be enough to save him."

 

The Historical Novels:
Here are the novels by Purdy I have not yet had a chance to read, so you are on your own. They are Jeremy’s Version (1970), The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974), Mourners Below (1981), and On Glory’s Course (1984), all of which Purdy saw as linked and named, as a series, "Sleepers in Moon- Crowned Valleys". Of the first two books in the series, Stephen D. Adams wrote that they extend Purdy's "history of the American soul by examining the impingement of a more distant past upon the present." Adams describes their relationship to each other as "contrapuntal rather than sequential", each book rich with "unique, surrealist images of human blindness" and narratives "constructed in such a way as to undermine the surface shapings of the various story-tellers."

Right after them comes In the Hollow of His Hand, which like the quartet is also a historical novel, this one set in the 1920s in the midwest. These books all deal with Purdy's sense of his family's history alongside the history of the midwest and the U.S. generally — In the Hollow of His Hand is a story of Native American identity, an identity that Purdy claimed more and more for himself as he got older, based on sketchy stories/rumors he remembered from one of his relatives, and which allowed him to think of himself as separate from the strain of American ancestry he considered debased, destructive, greedy, and fundamentally stupid. For a thorough look at Purdy and indigeneity, see Michael Snyder's Ph.D. dissertation, "Mixedblood Metaphors".

✒

That should be enough to get anyone started. Still, I don't think you should be especially anxious about which Purdy you read. Just read him. Let yourself fall into his weird structures and strange visions, knowing they may be so unconcerned with any of the niceties of contemporary fiction that they will seem alien; but they are not alien — they are, rather, unique, which is a different thing altogether.



Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more