A Gay and Melancholy Sound (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) [Kindle Edition]

Merle Miller (Author), Nancy Pearl (Introduction)

Book Description

The first book in nationally renowned librarian Nancy Pearl’s new Book Lust Rediscoveries series, this lost literary classic is available for the first time in decades. As funny and entertaining as it is captivating and heartrending, A Gay and Melancholy Sound is a shattering depiction of modern disconnection and the tragic consequences of a life bereft of love.

Joshua Bland has lived the kind of life many would define as extraordinary. Born in a small Iowa town to a controlling, delusional mother who had always wanted a daughter rather than a son, her anger at him colors his life. His father, a compassionate drinker incapable of dealing with Joshua’s mother, walks out on his wife and son, leaving a vacuum in the family that is damagingly filled by his tutor-cum-stepfather Petrarch Pavan, scion of a wealthy New York family who has secrets of his own. Playing on Joshua’s brilliance, Petrarch trains him to win a nationwide knowledge competition, but Joshua’s disappointing results in the finals are met with anger and disbelief by both his mother and stepfather. If Petrarch was unsuccessful in teaching Joshua the information he needed to win the contest, he had more success in instilling Joshua with the cynicism, self-doubt, and self-hatred that fill his own soul.

Enlisting in the army during World War II, he serves first as an infantryman, where his irreverent letters home turn him into a best-selling author. Then, as a paratrooper, he meets the physical challenges he thought were beyond his reach and helps free the concentration camps before being wounded as the Allied forces free Buchenwald. Back home after the war, he becomes a wildly successful producer—and all of this by the age of thirty-seven. But when his production company flounders amid critical and financial woes, the reality of who he is becomes perfectly, depressingly clear: he has had a lifetime of extraordinary experiences—and no emotional connection to any of it.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

In his most ambitious book (others: That Winter, Reunion, A Secret Understanding) and possibly longest, Merle Miller has taken a stencil of modern American life and has omitted few of its smudges. His hero, or (as he calls himself) anti-hero, Joshua Bland, former child prodigy, "again Quiz Kid," World War II hero, theatrical producer, at 37 [is] in utter despair ... He records on tape the story of his life, and the novel is told largely in flashback. Bland's life (the significance of the name is obvious) consists of a series of disorders -- personal and sociological, and his record contains more villains than heroes. Villains: not surprisingly, his mother, an "artsy-craftsy," culture hound who was determined that her child would be a genius; her second husband, Petrarch Pavan, a characterless fraud, whom Josh most clearly resembled; his first wife Letty, a dedicated social climber who made a monster of their daughter; and a number of other general types, epitomizing moral vacuity among the more publicized and commercial aspects of American life -- in Hollywood, Washington and New York. Bland is, of course, sensitive and intelligent enough to be able to tell the good guys from the bad; his tragedy (the publisher's word) is that he is unable to properly respond to the best influences in his life and seems, in fact, compelled to destroy those people who revealed their weakness by loving him. Now [he has] alienated the last person who might have helped him -- his second wife.... Bland's problem is an increasingly familiar one in American fiction -- the inability to "love." The difficulty is that the word is used as if its mere statement were sufficient to establish the worth of the character. Merle Miller's "anti-hero", beginning as a freak, never had a chance. But apart from essentials there is no question that the book is clever, witty, and intelligent and that Merle Miller has accurately identified the American infirmities.

About the Author

Merle Miller was born on May 17, 1919 in Montour, Iowa, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. He joined the US. Army Air Corps during World War II, where he worked as an editor of Yank. His best-known books are his biographies of three presidents: Plain Speaking: An Oral History of Harry Truman, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, and Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. His novels include That Winter, The Sure Thing, Reunion, A Secret Understanding, A Gay and Melancholy Sound, What Happened, Island 49, and A Day in Late September. He also wrote We Dropped the A-Bomb, The Judges and the Judged, Only You, Dick Daring!, about his experiences writing a television pilot for CBS starring Barbara Stanwyck and Jackie Cooper, and On Being Different, an expansion of his 1971 article for the The New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” He died in 1986.

Nancy Pearl is a librarian and lifelong reader. She regularly comments on books on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Her books include 2003’s Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason, 2005’s More Book Lust: 1,000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment and Reason; Book Crush: For Kids and Teens: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Interest, published in 2007, and 2010’s Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers. Among her many awards and honors are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from Library Journal; the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association; the 2010 Margaret E. Monroe Award from the Reference and Users Services Association of the American Library Association; and the 2004 Women's National Book Association Award, given to "a living American woman who …has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 862 KB
• Print Length: 585 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1612182976
• Publisher: AmazonEncore (April 3, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B006VFZPK8
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,284 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

128 of 145 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars The Catching of the Snark May 11, 2012

By Daniel Myers VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I do not agree with Nancy Pearl (understatement). I think she is completely wrong-headed in her reasons for disinterring this book from its well-deserved out-of-print status, and my prediction is that will once again achieve such status, never, one can only hope, to be resuscitated evermore.

The adjectives I think best-employed to describe the soul-sapping trudge through a life, and death, that constitutes this book are dispiriting and boring. It is the only novel I have ever read where the parts I underlined were, almost to a one, quotes from other authors that the now clapped-out former child prodigy narrator, Joshua Bland, dictates into his reel-to-reel tape recorder in the drug-hazed narration of his life.

Ms. Perle lauds the book for its "snark." And if it's snark upon snark for which a prospective reader hunts, s/he will find the creature here, in abundance. But a novel cannot subsist, as this one, for the most part, tries to do, on snark alone.

Ms. Perle also states that there are those poor readers who will simply not understand our narrator's self-loathing and self-destructive behaviour. Not a bit of it! The problem with the book or, I should say, another problem with it, is that it is TOO understandable. Man/woman is born. S/he suffers. S/he dies. Do we really need 500+ pages of narration to elaborate upon this fact without nuance, without poetry, without subtlety, but with ironic snark alone?

The only book which comes to mind with which to compare this one is the even longer, even more snarky Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux, in which even more authors are quoted, even more erudition on display and even more unleavened venom against the human condition forced into the reader's veins.

Prospective reader: Life is short, too short to waste upon over five-hundred pages stuffed with bilious, insipid bemoanings of one's outcast state. We all bemoan our state from time to time, but to cast such bemoanings into something new and original, into tragic art, requires the genius of a Shakespeare or of a Shelley or of a Nietzsche. Mr. Miller is not in their company.

Unlike in Lewis Carroll's poem, it's easy to catch a snark in this novel: Just close your heart.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth the read June 12, 2012

By Myharpo

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book was suggested in the kindle newsletter as something life changing. I stayed with it to the end though many times i felt melancholy! It just didnt rate in my opinion. It was torture trying to get through it and i kept hoping for something to turn around. I wanted insight to his world and what made him the way he was, but i just never bonded with the character.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gay and Melancholy Sound (Book Lust Rediscoveries) May 24, 2012

By Lillian Dabney

Format:Paperback

Joshua Bland, former prodigy, whiz kid, WWII hero and theatrical producer has endured a variety of emotional traumas from early childhood onward. At 37, in despair he relates his story, told largely in a series of flashbacks that he is recording on tape.

The people that populate Joshua Bland's life are challenging and often devoid of moral character. Joshua understands this and is still able to recognize sheer goodness. But the irreparable emotional damage he has suffered renders him incapable of returning that goodness in any form. His response is in fact, to destroy those who love him.

One suspects there is a lot of Merle Miller in Joshua Bland as well as a bit of us as readers. What prevents this novel from being unbearably sad is his sardonic wit, his intelligent perceptions of human nature, his dark humour and eloquent prose.

A Gay and Melancholy Sound is a bit disturbing, yet remarkably truthful and authentic. The novel is astonishingly timeless. While Joshua seeks to make sense of his life we find we want to make sense of parts of our own.

We should be very grateful to Nancy Pearl for returning this wonderful novel to print.