The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Glenway Wescott (Author), Michael Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: January 31, 2001

This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Towers, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and farcical, begins. A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner's The Bear as one of the finest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a slight, peculiar masterwork of 20th century letters....a cocktail of aphorism, acuity, and self-doubting narration, a novel that refuses to behave itself. What is so wonderful about The Pilgrim Hawk—and what remains jarring seventy years after its original serialization in Harper’s—is that it constantly goes against the grain of fictional narration...In The Pilgrim Hawk, Wescott suggests that when it comes to the most vital questions of life and love, it may be more worthwhile to ask rather than answer them." —Ingrid Norton, Open Letters Monthly

About the Author

Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) was the author of the novels The Grandmothers and Apartment in Athens, in addition to several collections of stories and essays. His life—as revealed in his published journals and a joint biography of him and his lover, Monroe Wheeler—has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days. He lives in New York. 

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (January 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940322560
• ISBN-13: 978-0940322561
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #869,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Make Your Way to "The Pilgrim Hawk", January 17, 2002

By 

Dale W. Boyer (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

A rediscovered classic currently being championed by Michael Cunningham (who wrote the introduction) and Susan Sontag (who wrote a lengthy New Yorker piece about it, as well as its forgotten author), this is a remarkably good short novel, full of wonderful writing and terrific perceptions. It's a thoughtful and profound study of the nature of marriage and attachments; I'm sure it's going to linger a great while in my memory. For those who care about serious fiction, this is well worth the time.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Upstairs, Downstairs in miniature, June 7, 2004

By 

Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This is an odd little book. The events take place in a single afternoon at the home of an American woman in France between the First and Second World Wars. The narrator, Alwyn Tower, and his hostess, Alexandra Henry, are visited by the Cullens, a middle-aged Irish couple. Mrs. Cullen has brought along her pet hawk Lucy whose presence dominates the remainder of the story (both symbolically and as another character). With its hood on, the hawk seems to represent the blindness of a class of wealthy internationals who live for food and fun, and who have made an uneasy peace with their captivity and lack of freedom.

Meanwhile, a trio of servants (Jean and Eva, the cooks; and Ricketts, the Cullens' chauffeur) plays yang to the aristocats' yin. For them, flirtation, jealousy, and passion are the defining mainstays of their existence. And they don't even need to turn to alcohol to release these life forces.

It's hard to know how seriously we are to take the narrator, a novelist twice failed in love. He is an astute observer and chronicler of the events, but his self-acknowledged failures as a writer certainly seem to justify the uncomfortable feelings he has toward Mrs. Cullen's captive carnivore. Although we know from page one that the Americans Alexandra and Alwyn would eventually return to America when tensions increase in Europe, at the novel's end it seems somewhat doubtful that either one will ever muster the energy needed to leave their perches in Alexandra's parlor.

This short novel has some of the biting class insights of Saki's better stories. Other than that, I find it hard to compare this book to any other I have ever read. Interesting in spite of and because of its brevity. Worth reading and rereading.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Crystalline beauty, February 14, 2001

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Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Westcott's short novel has been for years something of a cult work among novelists for its structural perfection. The interlocking erotic and sympathetic triangles among the characters, and the novel's complex explosion of the meaning of the eponymous peregrine (which is pushed as far as symbolic meanings go to the level of either Hawthorne's scarlet letter or James's golden bowl) is absolutely dazzling, and shows the tremednous talent within Westcott that never received its full due. However, the novel does remain somewhat chilly: it's hard to warm to any of the major characters, whose purposeful shallowness can seem somewhat off-putting.