MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE: By Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, Ed. by Patrick White

by Patrick White ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1986

What at first glance, for Nobelist White, reads like a romp--broadly comic and seemingly flyweight--is yet a book quite consistent with the theme of personal transubstantiation that has involved the author in other, more serious modes (The Twyborn Affair). Alex Gray is an old woman and old friend of Patrick White. She has had--in vivid fantasy if not in fact--an extraordinary life, liberally soaked in reincarnation. She's been a Greek Orthodox nun; an internationally scandalous ""character""; she's going on a theatrical tour of the Australian outback as an Isadora Duncan-ish interpretrix; she's involved in a London avant-garde theater troop (funny); she befriends and then kidnaps a bum from the park, believing him to be the Messiah. And all these scenes she records tersely but colorfully in a notebook--a literary property that one day will be handled by her executor, Patrick White. Except that White seems to be in league with Alex's drab and beleaguered spinster daughter Hilda in regretfully coming to the opinion that Alex has flipped her wig. Alex, however, knows better: ""According to the vision of myself in the glass I could not be dismissed as a geriatric nut. Certainly ravaged, I still radiated the strength of will of those who are being saved up for some final scene in the terrifying theatre of life. You couldn't refer to 'death,' as Hilda and Patrick might if they dared abandon their bourgeois discretion""--which oh so subtly seems to deliver a lampooned White self-portrait--a prig, scribbling in a desperate attempt to justify his staleness--that in fact is a sly explanation of the ideas of multifariousness White's been working out in his latest endeavors. Seeming fluff--but look again (and as always savor the startling twists of White's style).

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION