THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JANE BOWLES

by Jane Bowles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 1966

Mrs. Bowles is a bizarre, oddly appealing writer with a strikingly idiosyncratic approach to the private drama of lonely misfits, blending the aura of the neo-Gothic (vaguely akin to the early Purdy and McCullers) with the unexpected lunacy and wit of Ivy Compton-Burnett. But her achievement, in the end, is pretty much sui generis: a novel like Two Serious Ladies, at once funny, poignant, and strangely haunting, is both an imaginative comedy of manners and a provocative moral fable, in which a bevy of saintly fools, brilliantly fleshed with an unusually subtle economy, act out the barely stated, but quite insistent, troubling theme of the impossibility of human relatedness. As distinct from fashionable black humorists, no surrealistic nihilism muddles the events: Mrs. Bowles' hallucinatory accents evolve inevitably and compassionately, just as the dialogue, gamely shifting between the commonplace and the demented, appears always appropriate to the individual, a gift as evident in the novel as it is in the included short stories. In the Summer House, a play which enjoyed a moderate success on Broadway during the Fifties, is cleverly wrought and emotionally persuasive, but its tale of a dragon mother and put-upon innocence, along with its rumpled exoticism and Mexican grotesques, suggests the influence of the author's friend, Tennessee Williams, though even here, through the creation of the wounded and tipsy Mrs. Constable, we have something of a Bowles original. ""Neglected Genius"" is the phrase now grafted on Christina Stead; perhaps the very modest Jane Bowles deserves a similar tribute, too.

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1966

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION