Some pieces are stronger than others. The content of Wescott’s previously unpublished stories may be uncomfortable for some.
A posthumous collection of short stories and essays by Wescott (1901-1987), arranged to reflect autobiographical continuity, includes previously unpublished pieces with explicitly sexual and gay themes.
Poet, essayist and acclaimed novelist Wescott (Pilgrim Hawk, 1940, etc.) may not be as familiar to the average reader as many of his contemporaries, but his works live on thanks, in part, to editor and biographer Rosco. The Wisconsin farm boy ascended from humble beginnings to consort with the crème de la crème of literary and political society during the early years of his career. A prolific writer while abroad, Wescott moved comfortably among the expatriate community in Europe during the 1920s and early ’30s and published many of his observations in magazines—often using his fictional alter ego, Alwyn Tower, as narrator. In “Mr. Auerbach in Paris,” he depicts an elderly, sight-impaired Germanophile who laments Germany’s defeat during World War I as he buys copious amounts of French artwork. In the frankly sexual title story, the narrator travels by bus to pursue an encounter with a man who reputedly has physical attributes much like the mythical Greek god Priapus. France’s lack of preparedness on the eve of World War II is the subject of “The Frenchman Six Feet Three.” After donning an ill-fitting uniform and completing two weeks of reserve military service, Roger Gaumond despairingly tells his friends (who are preparing to leave the country) that France cannot survive the coming war without intervention from the U.S. and Great Britain. Also included in this collection is the heretofore unpublished “An Example of Suicide,” a meticulous examination of human thought processes and our belief that, once committed, we must follow through with actions. It’s an excellent story and worthy of inclusion in any top-notch anthology. But other pieces disappoint for their disproportionately heavy-handed, elliptical writing, including the tedious “The Odor of Rosemary” and the blurry “Sacre de Printemps.”
Some pieces are stronger than others. The content of Wescott’s previously unpublished stories may be uncomfortable for some.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29690-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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