Customer Reviews

Corpus of Joe Bailey (The Arbor House library of contemporary Americana)

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CORPUS OF JOE BAILEY has been called many things--The Great San Diego Novel--The Great California Novel--then there are those of us who believe it is a very strong candidate for The Great American Novel. Anybody who has ever felt insecure (e.g., everybody) can relate to its hero, Joe Bailey. I'm not going to give a plot synopsis--go to a second-hand bookstore and READ it. Nobody's ever been able to put it down once they begin with book one chapter one page one: "JOE".

Joe's struggles with his insecurities are played out against the background of the booming twenties, the depression, the war, postwar America--it's a huge chunk of life. I am honored to own a 1955 paperback of this novel. I had the privilege, in the fall of 1998, at a PEN banquette in Los Angeles, of having that copy signed by the author, Oakley Hall, just before he was given a lifetime achievement award. Then Oakley was gracious enough to give me a blurb for my own first novel, just published, One of the Guys.

But my book cannot hope to compare to the panoramic CORPUS. Why isn't this novel being taught in the schools? There's an effort underway to get U. of Cal. Press to reprint it. And then there is the constant gossip and speculation: Who WAS Con Robinson? Did she really die in an auto accident? Did her sister really kill herself on the train from Los Angeles? What was it about these women that drove men of Oakley Hall's generation out of their minds with passion?

The diehard fans continue to tour San Diego in their Joe Bailey van, drinking champagne as they go from site to site of the famous novel. I myself had the privilege, circa 1985, of looking up from my barstool in the Lamplighter on University in San Diego--one of the bars in the book--and recognizing a jukebox which Oakley had described in JB. It was one of the most glorious moments of my six-year drinking career.

Will future generations be denied experiences like these as city planners haphazardly tear down Joe Bailey landmarks, and as publishers refuse to reprint the novel? No, not as long as we true believers carry this great novel in our hearts everywhere.

Thank you, Oakley. Thank you, Joe. And thank YOU, Con, you hot dead babe, wherever you are. The back of the 1955 paperback says it all, a motto for almost every relationship I've ever had: "They cannot love each other fully, yet neither can they leave each other alone." Try to top THAT, you mediocre postmodern writers, most of whom probably don't even know what a "corpus" IS! Fans out there? Write to me!

This is Hall's breakrough novel, and there are few stronger. After a few years of writing excellent thrillers under the names of Jason Manor and O.M.Hall,he wrote a masterpiece. Corpus Of Joe Bailey is a key novel for all who were young during the pre & post WW11 years, for those whose parents were there, for all those who love good uncompromising fiction. The book is a haunting marvel. He went on to write the classic Warlock, but Bailey resonates more and more as the years go by.

An important novel about post-WWII America, especially California. Vivid characters, deeply involving plot and a marvelous sense of place and time. A real time capsule. Also, the best book yet with a site-specific San Diego setting.

First, I am just grateful to Amazon that I was able to find this book. I read it when I was sixteen years old in my home town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. A friend had it and loaned it to us, teenage boys with wild imaginations, as a "dirty book." As I read it then, I knew nothing of the places in California, San Diego, Oakland and all of it. I am now sixty-seven and I had been in the navy, trained in San Diego, traveled many of the streets Oakley Hall wrote about. I was amazed at how much I remembered from the reading back in 1960 and the book was old yet new; old in my memories but new in how I saw the characters and their actions. I see it as a timeless story dealing with universal themes as Joe Bailey struggles with his possessive and conflicted love for Connie Robinson, almost the same themes expressed in "Rain Tree County" and "War and Peace." After reading it I set it aside to read again later in the year. I am a writer myself and a photographer so between my own work, I need a break like reading this. This is not light reading, but most of my reading is technical on photography, light, cameras, lenses and flash units so it was a relaxing reading for me and as a writer, I am always impressed with the body of work Oakley Hall turned out. He writes in a style that involves you yet is clear, passionate, easy to follow and makes you want to return to the characters again and again. I want to avoid spoilers but I imagine most of us are re-reading this and know the story but I felt such anguish for the changes in his relationship with his best friend Pete. The pseudo-triangle between Joe, Con, and Pete was so surprising and went so astray from what I expected. The characters became citizens in my world and I found myself feeling for them in each triumph, each failure, each loss. I wish he had written another book specifically to Joe's time in the marine corps during the war. That was to me the book's greatest failing, that he enlisted and then the war was over. We missed all those adventurous years as a marine and what we gather, a good marine too. The words of the 1940's hint strongly at the actions but they are code words for sex, abortion, homosexuality. The book does not suffer for that for we know what happened from the code words. It is just not so clearly specific as something written today but that's good also. We can buy those books written by other authors. This book is now a classic and I heartily recommend it for my generation, especially the males of it.

Stephen Joe Payne