In the Hollow of His Hand [Paperback]

James Purdy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 1997

A powerful novel by James Purdy set in the 1920s Midwest. Purdy explores the eruption of a scandal in a tight-knit community, when a Native American claims the parentage of a white couple’s son.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Ojibwa Indian, Decatur, returns from World War I to the small Midwestern town of Yellow Brook where he sees the youth Chad Coultas and suddenly understands the boy is his son. The conflicting claims of Decatur and those of his legal father, Lewis, send Chad on a coming-of-age journey that takes him from the high life in 1920s Chicago to the Canadian wilds, initiating him into sex, drugs and the complications of filial love. Purdy (In a Shallow Grave tells a highly charged gothic tale, using larger-than-life characters of grand gesture and eloquence to express universal themes. Unfortunately, Chad's adventures read haltingly, as though they'd been composed sentence by sentence with long periods of time in between, a quality that seriously diminishes the tale's narrative drive, as well as the reader's enjoyment.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Purdy's characters inhabit an extravagant world in which lakes "savagely churn" and a dying man's lips are "curtains of blood." Set in the larger-than-life 1920s, his rollicking story is equal to the purple prose: Chad, the illegitimate offspring of an Ojibwa Indian and a society matron, is successively abducted by his natural and legal fathers, all as a prelude to a succession of even more preposterous episodes as the boy escapes across the North Central states. Purdy, as often before, favors a lamb-among-wolves as his hero; Chad's story is but a frame for the wry portrait of moral hypocrisy that is always at the heart of his books. Highly recommended. Rob Schmieder, Boston
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers; First British Edition edition (January 8, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0720606950
• ISBN-13: 978-0720606959
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very funny and surprisingly touching novel by neglected mast, March 3, 2003

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Hollow of His Hand (Hardcover)

-er.

Although it does not seem to have been either a commercial or a critical success (and is out-of-print, though widely available), I think that James Purdy's 1986 novel is superb: a hilarious but oddly touching book. For the first hundred-plus pages it provides an account of a not-very-bright, twelve-year-old Chad Coultas, growing up in a small Midwestern town at an unspecified date between the end of World War I and the start of the Great Depression. (Purdy was born in 1927 and grew up in rural Ohio. . . but I doubt was as poor a student as Chad.) His usually absent father, Lewis, has squandered his mother-in-law's fortune in bad investments. His mother stays in the mansion-sized house, trying to ignore realities of any sort, preferring to work on delicate embroidery. His sister spends most of her time in front of a mirror practicing to become an actress.

And then Decatur, a decorated Menominee Indian hero of the First World War, whose fortune has been waxing as the Coultas one has waned, starts stalking Chad. picking him up after school each day in a different car. This alarms his spinster teacher, Miss Lytle, who had been Decatur's teacher earlier. Miss Lytle visits Mrs. Coultas, but the latter is even more reluctant to acknowledge this disconcerting pattern than she is to face the realities of her husband's infidelities and malfeasances. . . or that her son looks remarkably like Decatur did when he was on the cusp of adolescence. Soon they are off on a rollicking road trips with both biological and legal fathers.
The second half of the novel is picaresque, but Chad is no picaró. He is too oblivious even to be an unreliable narrator, so it is good that Purdy did not make him the narrator.

There is some blood (and tar and feathers...), but the novel is not depressing, as some of Purdy's other fiction definitely is. Much of it is uproariously funny, though deadly serious issues of racism are central to the plot. Although the book veers away from lyrical realism into dreamily gothic surrealism half-way through, I found the second half very entertaining. Some suspending of disbelief is necessary, but not as much as in David Lynch works, and the book has a satisfying denouement (unlike not only much of David Lynch's work, but some of Purdy's other work, too).

Recognizing that I am in a minority, I highly recommend this novel as more than a worthy successor to such earlier masterpieces as MALCOM and IAM ELIJAH THRUSH.