From Publishers Weekly
In this first collection of eight stories, the lavishly named Amaryllis in "A View of Manhattan" is one of the "bad girls" in a loose assembly running from plain to naughty to really quite wicked. She is involved in a short-lived resumption of an affair begun nearly 20 years earlier. In Sheldon's expensive high-rise, they couple in myriad ways, including one episode while she is basting the roasting pheasant for Thanksgiving Day dinner. Airborne for London, Amaryllis gazes earthward to see in a scene of surreal phantasmagoria the city in flames, the Chrysler Building split in two, the final torrent of poisonous brimstone rendering a terrible judgment. Among the more complex "pleasures" of the story "Simple Pleasures" are gin and reefer, champagne and cocaine, raunchy disco and assorted drugs, freewheeling sex, murder and madnessas well as Vivaldi and a nice cup of tea. Despite a weakness for the lurid and discursive, for excessive detail and a slackness of narrative form, Flanagan, an American living in London, brings a lively imagination to highly charged writing in an interesting debut. November 21
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
