Amazon.com Review
In 1956, James Purdy published
Don't Call Me By My Right Name and Other Stories, and in the years since, he has produced some of the most remarkable stories, novels, and plays in the English language. Praised by artists as diverse as Dame Edith Sitwell, Gore Vidal, and John Waters for his evocative diction, emotional subtlety, and disturbingly baroque narratives, Purdy has created an emotional, psychological landscape uniquely American in its depiction of fear, love, loss, and violence. In
Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue--his 14th novel and 46th book--he charts the life of Carrie Kinsella, a stifled, repressed woman who suddenly realizes the emptiness of her own life after the death of her daughter Gertrude, a brilliant artist. In her search for the "real" Gertrude, Carrie realizes that it is actually herself she is attempting to find. As in his classics
Eustace Chisolm and the Works and
In a Shallow Grave, Purdy's understanding of the horrors of the human heart--and the slim but possible potential for salvation--shines through here in ways that are devastating and sublime.
Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue is James Purdy at his best, which is to say magnificent.
--Michael Bronski
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The first novel published here in a decade by the prolific and award-winning author (Malcom; In a Shallow Grave) is idiosyncratic and tantalizingly elusive. Chicago matron Carrie Kinsella is devastated by the death of her daughter Gertrude, a defiant and gifted painter contemptuous of her sheltered, unsophisticated mother. Neither Carrie's ailing, condescending husband (whom she deferentially and habitually addresses as "Daddy") nor her worldly and much-married sister-in-law, Gwen, is initially sympathetic to Carrie's quest to understand the daughter she never really knew. Carrie pores over the pages of her daughter's journal, a scrapbook of odd, sometimes salacious remarks about the men who posed for her paintings and often became her lovers. Her search leads her to other odd discoveries: her husband's own peculiar notes, a catalogue of yesterday's pop-culture minutiae called An Index of America's Forgotten Items; the seductive hospitality of the Spenser scholar Evelyn Awbridge and of Cy Mellerick, a golden youth who takes Carrie to her daughter's studio. As these glittering cicerones?so highly erudite, so studied in their dress and speech that a faint whiff of gothic parody surrounds them?lead Carrie deeper into the past, a novel that at first seems a relatively naturalistic narrative about loss and recovery becomes a richly detailed if somewhat diffuse allegory. Purdy alludes to Demeter's search for Persephone, imbuing Carrie's search with mythic resonance. Yet the turning point in the book?Carrie's confrontation of the sumptuous and brazen canvases in her daughter's studio?suggests that the American temperament epitomized by Carrie?provincial, philistine, repressed?needs art, needs music, needs sensual pleasure as an essential tonic. Certainly the carefully wrought pages of this novella will stimulate the patient reader.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
