A STONE MAN, YES

by Daniel Curley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 26, 1964

A stone man on a stone jug chasing a stone girl..."" is the perfect expression of a changeless frustration that never diminishes in intensity. George Scott is suspended in pursuit of his wife Alice while she looks back at him, not in horror, but with a triumphant snarl. Their marriage emerges as an almost sexless house-sharing held together by Alice's insistent Catholicism (which she maintains to the letter while mocking the spirit) and an unspoken, shared agreement not to kill each other. Scott has reached that stage of victimization where he welcomes Alice's most viperish tirades as a self-appreciated test of strength. Although Alice keeps Scott a jug's length away, she forms a liaison with Pratt, the youngest instructor in Scott's department on the extension campus of a shoddy state university. Scott ""researches"" Pratt's rambling journals after Pratt's suicide. In Pratt's clumsy, self-indulgent posturing he discovers a younger edition of himself as well as the affair. This leads to a confrontation at last, but the conclusion is a question that leaves the classic question of the stone jug -- who gets whom? The parry and thrust of the dialogue brings motion to this picture of a masochist going nowhere and engages reader attention without necessarily engaging reader sympathy.

Pub Date: June 26, 1964

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1964

Categories: FICTION