HIS FIRST MINUTE AFTER NOON

by Sally Daniels ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 1966

This opens with Peggy Turner's unposted letters to Odette, the younger woman who occasioned her husband Jack's first episode of infidelity after fourteen years of marriage. Odette had been capable of listening with a wondrous intensity and Miss Daniels demands something of that nature from her readers. For His First Minute After-Noon is actually quite a few fifty minute hours strung together in which she audits her relationship with Jack; the tentatively stabilized ""new state"" which followed the ""whole new dimensions"" Odette made possible; the assignment of various kinds of guilt; her past (an undergraduate affair with an impotent young man); her sense of identity; etc. etc. Miss Daniels writes reasonably well, as she distinguishes, scrutinizes, qualifies in the ""words"" of ""my world"" -- ""ego, empathy, confrontation."" This is the world which proceeds ""from an assumption of need and neurosis""; it is also very patently the world of perception made possible through analytic procedures which destroy the natural response while sharpening the interior revelation. Then there's another major liability; while Peggy cerebrates endlessly, the reader feels very little. In her words, in her world, it's the primacy of ego over empathy.

Pub Date: May 18, 1966

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION