MRS. MUNCK

by Ella Leffland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 1970

This disfigured view of life, egregiously eccentric and sometimes bordering on the malevolent (and it is hard to justify the publisher's bemused comparison to Wuthering Heights) takes place in California where Rose Munck, widowed at 43, finally achieves her opportunity to retaliate against the man who seduced her as a girl and was responsible for a child who died. Now old Mr. Leary, partially paralyzed, is released to her unloving bands from a nursing home. She terrorizes him with the prospect of his imminent death; he throws a kitchen knife at her and heaves a chair out of the window; but in time they both quiet down, particularly when Rose is temporarily distracted from her ultimate purpose by an affair. When last seen, she has deposited Mr. Leary with her mother on the dirtpoor farm of her origins. . . . One reads this irritably, as if picking away at a scab and then relieved when its unsightly presence is removed. But then this is the effect Ella Leffland deliberately intended and it is restrictively successful inside its shrivelling sphere of hostilities.

Pub Date: July 20, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION