Short History of a Prince [Paperback]

Jane Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1999

A young man looks back on his adolescence to when he was 15, a year in which he discovered a passion for another boy, and when his brother was dying of an insidious illness. This is a story of family relationships, the pain and insecurity of adolescence, friendship, love and fate.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Sean Leonard (Much Ado About Nothing, Dead Poet's Society) brings a dramatic dimension to the bittersweet story of Walter McCloud, who has high hopes of becoming a ballet dancer. Leonard's flexible voice captures the thoughts and feelings of Walter both as a teenager and as a thirty-something high school teacher. The story begins with the star, an aspiring adolescent ballet dancer, coming to terms with his lack of talent when he is chosen to be the Prince in a third-rate production of the Nutcracker, while his friends dance lead roles in Chicago. The same winter, Walter has his first homosexual experience and his older brother becomes terminally ill. These profound events will haunt Walter for 20 years as he focuses on his coming to terms with his past tragedies and present shortcomings--making for a moving and often funny tale of forgiveness and understanding. Curiously, it is not his love of Balanchine, music and other refined aesthetics that restore a floundering Walter. The anchor he finds is a place, the family summer home on a lake in Wisconsin. It is Hamilton's ability to juxtapose the remarkable against the unremarkable that gives this work its poignancy and grace. --Anne Depue (Running Time: 4 Hours; Four Cassettes) --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

From Library Journal

Funny, complicated Walter McCloud is at the heart of this quiet interior novel, which gracefully wanders back and forth between two decades?Walter's early 1970s sophomore year in high school and his late 1990s stint as a small-town Midwest high school teacher. As Hamilton has shown in Map of the World (LJ 5/15/94), no one writes better of the abyss that cracks apart family members facing the loss of a child. As Walter's 18-year-old brother, Daniel, lies dying of cancer during much of the 1972-73 school year, Walter comes to grips with his own homosexuality and the inaccessibility of his parents, who are swallowed up in their grief. Walter's pivotal friendships with the beautiful Susan and Mitch, the boy they both love, sustains, shatters, and alters his sense of self as he stumbles toward adulthood. Hamilton's forte?depicting adolescents left not by villainy but by circumstance on the fringes of family life while they figure out ways to raise themselves?is at its most painful clarity in this novel. Highly recommended.
-?Beth E. Anderson, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 431 pages
• Publisher: Black Swan (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055299801X
• ISBN-13: 978-0552998017
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,681,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jane Hamilton is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, and A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, the Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club. Her following work, The Short History of a Prince, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, her novel Disobedience was published in 2000, and her last novel When Madeline Was Young was a Washington Post Best Book of 2006. She lives in and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best novel I have read in years, November 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Short History of a Prince : A Novel (Hardcover)

After finishing The Short History of a Prince, I have been ruined for other novels for a long time. I still feel like I'm living Walter's life with him. I felt close to almost all of the characters. Jane Hamilton worked magic with that book.

I am usually the type of person who stops reading novels if they are not up to my standards, or if they bore me. I could not put this book down. I lost sleep over it.

For many of you who felt that the characters were not real enough for you, I have to say that I suspect that your comments and attitudes reveal your homophobia. I mean, if we all read literature with characters who were similar to ourselves, we wouldn't have much to read at all! It made my heart soar to experience the "coming of age" of a homosexual character, and to read about love between partners of the same sex.

My recommendation to everybody is to open your minds a bit, and allow yourselves to experience beauty.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captures character and milieu beautifully, January 30, 2000

By 

Bruce E. Henderson "rhodasdad" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Short History of a Prince: A Novel (Paperback)

While this is a somewhat unorthodox basis for a review, I'd like to state that I went to high school with Jane Hamilton and knew the people who were the basis for Walter, Mitch, and Susan. I respect readers who found the book a departure from Hamilton's technique and usual settings (3rd person, male-centered, suburban rather than 1st person, female-centered, rural) and who found Walter a difficult character to like. At the same time, less in the spirit of a review than in clarification, I can say that the man who was the basis for Walter was charming and vulnerable, while also being self-centered, and he did talk exactly the way Hamilton has him talk in the novel. Further, the assumption that Hamilton doesn't understand the nuances of a gay man does seem provincial to me--should Flaubert not have written "Madame Bovary," then? And those readers who use their own heterosexuality as an excuse for not liking the book--well, that reflects your own limitations more than Hamilton's or the book's. I found this book more of a struggle than her earlier ones--domestic violence and child death/abuse are more engaging topics for the majority of readers, weened on Oprah and Sally Jessy, et. al., than the struggles of a gay boy in search of self. But it finally is worth the effort--and I think Hamilton's enormous insight and empathy achieves a depth of feeling for Walter lacking in most Gen-X fiction by gay men I have read. And I will say this--I know one young man this book gave enough courage and self-reflection to to permit him to come out to himself and those around him. Does this make it great literature? Of course not--but it should make us think before we simply dismiss it because it doesn't immediately connect with the lives of middle-class housewives who all too willingly want only fiction that allows them to see themselves as victims or fairy tale heroines.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful character studies, July 31, 1999

By 

L. Blumenthal "lynn" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Short History of a Prince : A Novel (Hardcover)

Unsuual characters, the kind you meet everday but never really think about, populate this amazing slice-of-life novel. For the reviewers who didn't get the point, I say "Look around you. Look at the people you think you understand. What stories do they hide deep in their souls?"

It's not just Hamilton's study of a gay man that wins my respect but her dead-on look at a woman (Susan) who can be cruel and self-centered while she is a loving a true friend. Or the neighbor who is a health-food freak and a chain smoker. Or the bi-sexual lover (Mitch) who can enter a gay relationship and then suddenly drop it like yesterday's newspaper. All of this is so real, so true to the way people really are.

This is a marvelously sensitive book full of humor and little truths that will have you nodding your head as you read.