THE REASON WHY THE CLOSET-MAN IS NEVER SAD

by Russell Edson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1977

Russell Edson specializes in the kind of one-minute tales and prose poems collected here, in the 84th volume of Wesleyan's poetry series; they're small slices of fiction that, having very little space in which to expand, abandon familiar fictional contexts--rather riskily. Character vanishes; men and women hallucinating, talking, filming movies, picnicking, even dining off their shoes and girdles, are caught in two strides and framed, unnamed and impersonal. The neat containers of time, place, or social event don't do the framing, either; everyone performs his dreamy activities in bland, decaying rooms or nowhere. Some of the resulting stories are merely little jokes, like the one in which a spinster turns into a double bed, or a man who splits in two, becomes his parents, and decides--in his new form--to have no children. A few are nightmares. But many of the tales are amorphous, in a way that Edson's other prose poems haven't been: ""The Scream"" and ""The Taxi,"" for instance, seem hardly more than an excuse for a few well-made images that fail to make much sense of the whole. The closet-man is never sad because ""you take things out of closets, you put things into closets, and nothing happens. . . ."" Well, that's true; stripped of almost everything but playful--sometimes gruesome--imagery, much too little happens here.

Pub Date: March 1, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION