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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Will There Never Be Another FAMILY DANCING?,
By H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: The Body of Jonah Boyd: A Novel (Hardcover)
When David Leavitt published FAMILY DANCING in the l980's, I was convinced that he would be our next great gay writer as that book of stories was so brilliantly written. I have read everything that Mr. Leavitt has written since; from where I sit, nothing has measured up to his first book. THE BODY OF JONAH BOYD is no exception. I really wish I liked his fiction more. He seems to be a terribly nice person, certainly has a flair for language and often makes profound statements about the world in general. He, moreover, is most adept at character development, piling on detail after detail to make his people come alive. Here we even know what kind of purse one woman carries and what she has in it, for example. But in the end I find most of his characters not very interesting. In this latest novel, they all apparently are heterosexual. (Perhaps Mr. Leavitt is aiming for a larger audience here.) The narrator is a "fat" secretary (Denny)-- that's her description of her body, not mine-- who jumps into bed with married older men faster than she can type--certainly a little difficult to fathom. Then there's the writer who either does or doesn't get his works accepted by THE NEW YORKER, a recurring dilemma for many of Leavitt's characters.What this novel does have going for it is that parts of it read almost like a decent mystery since Jonah Boyd's novel manuscript is missing.Yes, this book is a book is a book about books. But it has little to do with the brillance of Mr. Leavitt's early work. Finally, whoever wrote the blurb on the inside front of the dust jacket said that this book is a tribute to "the sisterhood of secretaries." Surely he or she cannot be serious.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An Emily Litella of a Novel,
By
This review is from: The Body of Jonah Boyd : A Novel (Hardcover)
You know what I mean, "Never mind!" Think the book is overwritten and laugh out loud when Ben says that his writing was overwritten? Doesn't matter. Think the book gets simple facts about the period wrong? Doesn't matter. Why? Because at the end the author takes no responsibility for the book, in a last chapter written in the same voice but a different voice. Confused enough? Hopefully, not even to waste your time on this book.
"The Body of Jonah Boyd" centers around a single Thanksgiving dinner in the late 1960's in a college town outside Los Angeles. Jonah Boyd is a writer, the second husband of Nancy Wright's best friend Ann. Ann used to play four-hand piano with Nancy until Nancy moved to the west coast, where she started playing four-hand piano with our alleged protagonist, Denny, her husband's secretary and paramour. Ann and Jonah come to visit the Wrights at Thanksgiving, during which the notebooks containing Jonah's new novel are mysteriously lost sometime around the time Jonah and the Wrights' youngest son Ben, an aspiring poet, went for a walk down the arroyo. This event was a turning point in Jonah's life, in Ann's life and in Ben's life, but not particularly in Denny's life, yet again, the reason she thought so much about it is explained in the last chapter. I'm sure there is some literary trick going on here that makes sense to the author and his editors, but the plot and characters in this book, as well as the overwritten prose style, "no cliche goes unused", don't make it worth your time. Find something better to read. It won't be hard.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One of his lesser efforts,
By
This review is from: The Body of Jonah Boyd: A Novel (Paperback)
Denny Denham is not only the secretary of Dr. Ernest Wright, a psychotherapist at Wellspring University, but also his lover and the best friend of his wife. Years after the 1968 Thanksgiving dinner she describes the events that took place: how the famous author Jonah Boyd and his second wife, a friend of Mrs. Wright, come for dinner and how he reads out loud part of the manuscript for his new novel. He takes the manuscript, written in leather-bound Italian notebooks, everywhere with him but the day after Thanksgiving they are suddenly lost. The whole house and surroundings are put upside down, but the notebooks remain lost: end of Jonah Boyd's career. Years later it becomes clear what happened to the notebooks and how they influenced the lifes of the people present at the dinner.
David Leavitt is a fantastic writer (The lost language of the cranes is wonderful), but this book appealed less to me. The family problems were very American and the storyline about the lost manuscript had a solution that one could see coming from a mile away. Despite all this it was a pleasant book to read during a rainy day camping.
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