From Publishers Weekly
Written between 1928 and 1930 but never before published, Miller's autobiographical novel describing his rage over his second wife's live-in lesbian lover is an awkward performance. Aspiring writer Tony Bring, depicted as a sensitive soul in a rotten world, is a misogynistic bully. Morbid enchantress Hildred, modeled on Miller's unbalanced wife, June Mansfield Smith, comes off as a pseudo-bohemian. Her lover, painter-poet Vanya (based on Jean Kronski), with an invented past as a bastard Romanoff princess, cuts a pathetic figure. The trio lives in a frescoed basement apartment in Brooklyn and cavorts in Greenwich Village. Vicious anti-Semitic remarks and references reflect the obsession that preoccupied Miller ( Tropic of Capricorn ) until after WW II; his homophobia is also offensive. Despite the verbal power of many passages, this novel remains mawkish, its overheated hand-me-down surrealism, purple prose and self-conscious decadence prefiguring the adolescent egomania of much of Miller's later work.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Written in the late 1920s but lost until 1960, Crazy Cock was the immediate predecessor to 1934's Tropic of Cancer ( LJ 6/15/61), Miller's first published work. This earlier autobiographical novel explores a wrenching three-way relationship involving writer Tony Bring, his wife Hildred, and her bohemian lover Vanya. By this point in his career Miller had begun to sense that conventional narrative was not his forte, but had not yet embraced the subjective, seemingly chaotic approach that would liberate his language. Crazy Cock has its moments of soaring rhetoric, but its primary value is to document the development of the most original American writer of his generation. For collections where Miller is read or studied.
-Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
