SOME OTHER PLACE. THE RIGHT PLACE

by Donald Harington ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 1972

This is a story -- sometimes -- of the ""lost places in the heart... and abandoned dreams, and the dying of childhood"" and other phantom places we might search for, if we're not too prosaic, and also of love and separateness or what Mr. Harington calls ""privity,"" and... it's also about a couple of young people not so much at odds with the world but liberated from it. Give or take away a hundred pages or so, this fantasy-projection-regression succeeds -- perhaps not as certainly nor as concentratedly as Lightning Bug. It's about Diana, just out of Sarah Lawrence, who discovers (from a newspaper) that Day, who is 18 and lives in East Passaic, New Jersey, can, in a trance, become the man who was her grandfather, Daniel Lyam Montross. Diana and Day take off to the woods where Daniel (as summoned up by Day) becomes very much part of their lives; so does sex; and eventually so does their search for him -- for themselves -- in the places where he lived from Five Corners in Vermont to Stick Around in Arkansas where G. (who might be Gumshoe or Genius or Godfather or any of the things Diana calls him) comes to find Diana, on behalf of her father, only to be sympathetically appropriated by the special kind of reality-unreality she has found. It's an affectionate, inductive experience which manages to conserve immanent values we lose sight of, or just lose.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1972

ISBN: 1592640710

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION