SICK FRIENDS

by Ivan Gold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 1969

Ivan Gold is a strikingly talented, intensely edgy writer who has yet to father a style capable of illuminating his own confusions (sexual, emotional, social) or of dramatizing them in a resonant way. Nickle Miseries, a collection of naturalist tales in the symbolist mode, was remarkable chiefly for its Jamesian attention to details and canny shaping of psychological nuances, but, aside from the already much anthologized title piece, the stories were generally more memorable in particular sequences than in cumulative effect. One felt this author's obvious energies were always in bondage to his ambivalent technique, so carefully hewn, so unfortunately muted. With Sick Friends, he appears to have thrown caution to the winds, for his eruptively autobiographical first novel, ""the love affair of a writer in his mid-thirties and a girl from California,"" is full of that nervy brilliance and flip confessional air which has marked so much of the fiction (or mood) of the Sixties, as well as conveying, though again largely in fits and starts, an astonishing sense of rage and sorrow which only someone intent on zeroing in on himself could have achieved. Still, Gold's chronic subjectivity and romantic desperation are his bugaboos, and he puzzles over them endlessly, often eclipsing everything else in sight, including (or especially) the novel's not altogether convincing femme fatale. Mailer, Roth, even Nabokov's Lolita are some of the mimetic properties Gold skillfully employs, but the mixture of the vascular, grubby, and cavalier is not always appropriate to what is essentially a character study of insecurity and, at its best, a poignant, deeply etched memoir.

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1969

ISBN: 0671756044

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1969

Categories: FICTION