In the Hollow of His Hand [Hardcover]

James Purdy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1986

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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.

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1st edition (August 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555840027
• ISBN-13: 978-1555840020
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,897,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Favorite Book, January 30, 2000

By 

C. Braun (Munich, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Hardcover)

This book is one of the greatest books I bought at the time when I was in the US. Pete Seeger wrote about the book: This is a great story, a great read, and has a great lesson to teach young Americans , black and white, of how you can be strongly rooted in your home community and at the same time see a sense of kindship with working people around this whole world. The battle to save the elected Loyalist government of Spain 50 years ago was the first battle in World War II. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and others may have lost a battle but they didn't lose the war, nor have lost it yet. Carry on! I want to send all my respect to the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, your international solidarity which you showed in the battle against the fascist Franco regime will never be forgotten, we will never forget you bright stars in the darkness.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Scolarship Needed on the Role of African Americans in the Lincoln Brigade, February 11, 2009

By 

Ron Turner (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Paperback)

This is an important book since the role African Americans and women play in world events is often ignored or minimized. Mr. Yates's first person account of Black men and women's contribution to Spain's Civil War is heartfelt and provides a small snapshot of events that transpired in 1937. Ultimately, the book raises more issues than it resolves: more needs to be known about Langston Hughes and Richard Wright in Spain during this period and a critical study of social activist Louise Thompson is long overdue. Yet Mississippi to Madrid, told in a simple, straight forward style, is a poignant memoir chronicling an important historic event and makes a compelling case for more scholarship on African Americans who served in the Lincoln Brigade.

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.