Customer Reviews

House of the Solitary Maggot

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book heads us back in time to the early years of the American 20th Century, a small town dominated by the character of Nora Bythethwaite (surely some tribute, if tribute is the right word, to Dame Edith Sitwell who first promoted James Purdy's writings to the world). It's an aristocratic American family which takes dysfunction to such an extreme it becomes its very life-force .. like people chewing each other up, spitting each other out, yet turning the taste sensation over and over in their mouths for the intense and immediate nostalgia of it. It's somewhat like a novel existing in a landscaped womb which holds all of its characters - the outside world is vivid yet somehow irrelevant as the family members become the pain and the glory and the meaning of each others' lives. This is one of the century's most wilfully wayward and daring productions (a fusion of Ibsen and Samuel Beckett perhaps?), and it's tremendous that we have it in a new edition to herald our way into the increased madness and dysfunction of a new millennium. Hooray!