Customer Reviews

In the Hollow of His Hand

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.