There are few good reasons to read a 45 year-old light comedy. Like an opened bottle champagne, light comedy doesn’t keep well. Plot and characterization are usually paper-thin to start with. Moods and manners are much of the age in which the book is written and lose most of their meaning within a few years. One character in this book says to another, “I half expected you to begin banging your shoe on the desk.” How many readers would get that reference today?
I picked up Perdita, Get Lost
The story, about a spunky young woman named Perdita Chandler (Chan for short) and Jerry Blake, the bachelor millionaire who’s sort of her uncle–but not–is about as well constructed as my first balsa wood airplane model. Key moments turn on such creaky pivots as the fact that Blake’s cat is also named Chan and the unexpected gift and theft of a rather ugly classical Greek statue. Even the construct of the millionaire relative with nothing but time on his hands could be something from a B-movie society comedy of the 1930s. As for the context–well, multiple martinis are downed in an average afternoon and all the young women are expected to be dreaming of a big suburban home in Westchester County complete with three kids and a collie. I kept expecting J. Pierrepont Finch to pop up.
So no, Perdita, Get Lost
“If we had a golden eagle in this apartment, we would all have hay fever. They’re full of pollen. I know!”
She had committed a social gaffe, which in English is known as a boner and in German undoubtedly by a polysyllabic portmanteau word that only another German would understand.
Her boner was to make a simple, positive, declarative statement.
This stops conversation.
A social gathering, such as Carla had gathered for whatever devious reasons, is like a saraband. There are certain movements, which must be countered by others. Conversation must flow like the waters of the Villa d-Este. A positive statement (like Carla’s “I know”) stops it.
Even had there been present an expert on golden eagles and their pollination (and there was none), he would have hesitated to dispute his assured hostess. So the “I know,” although strictly out of the blue (where the golden eagles live) brought everything to a full stop.
Jackson wrote another novel, East 57th Street
, 
, from 2005; Tim Gautreaux’s bayou novel, 
from 2003; Joseph O’Connor’s multi-faceted story of the post-Civil War West, 
, from 2007.
dates from 1993, and 
, the last work published by Eugene Izzi, a Chicago crime novelist, before his suicide, from 1999.
. Chris Goodrich of the L. A. Times had some pretty enthusiastic things to say when the book first came out:
tells the story of a confrontation between whites and Native Americans to which neither journalism nor scholarship could possibly do justice. The novel takes place in South Dakota in the 1970s, when local developers start the short-lived Bones War while building a golf course on an ancient burial ground. The American Indian Movement is at its height, government authorities feel under constant siege, the U.S. appears on the verge of living up to its ideals or of falling flat on its face; Michael Doane uses this real-life civil strife to illuminate the individual troubles, and principles, such rebelliousness brings to the fore…. 
is print but “out of stock’. His 1990 novel, 
is available now–until Amazon sells the one copy they have left. Several of Doane’s works, including 
garnered 5-star reviews from Amazon readers, so there’s got to be something there worth a look.
Thumbing through issues of 
, which I 
Possibly so; and it may be my fault that they don’t seem to notice there was no way for him to behave well. He had only a choice of behaving badly in different ways. What I mean is that like is like that. Many of the most admired moral examples really will not stand close and logical examination. It is so in the nature of things. Human beings are inevitably in an appalling predicament between their emotions and their obligations; the two elements are not even conveniently distinct, but inextricably snarled in a cat’s-cradle. And the more you try to untable it the worse it becomes.
He married twice. The first time, he was undecided between two sisters. His personal preference was for the younger and prettier of the two; one may assume he was in love with her. But out of sheer altruism, he felt it would be invidious to leave the elder and plainer sister slighted. So he married the elder. It is not known whether the younger was in love with him. She might have been. He was a man of charm, wit, and general attractiveness. And if the younger girl was in love with him, I can’t make up my mind–I am very fond of him–which of the two girls had the best right to murder him on the spot. Both of them, in my opinion, had every right to do so. He had injured the girl he loved and insulted the one he married.
Bruce Allen wrote recently to recommend the novels of François Mauriac:
Fortunately for would-be readers, a good deal of Mauriac’s work is in print and easily available for purchase online. All of the above books are in print, as are several less-known works: 
, Peter Greave’s life up to his mid-thirties was one no reader could envy. Born in Calcutta in 1910, he enjoyed a few years of privileged childhood as his father climbed the ladder of business success with an English merchant trading firm in India.
is a spectacular failure. I kept thinking as I read of the time I saw a Titan III rocket blow up less than a thousand feet off the launchpad. No one would call that a success–but it sure was spectacular, awesome in its size and power, hitting us with a tremendous roar and shock wave seconds after we saw the explosion. Millions of dollars and the work of thousands was scattered in bits over the southern slopes of Vandenberg Air Force Base. A considerable effort lay behind that failure.
and Ayn Rand’s 
–and no one could argue that either one of them lacked for ambition. 
Not there isn’t any action in 
It’s particularly noteworthy when one realizes who 
in 1929; Spears’ 
, which recounted the many ways in which DeGaulle and others in the Anglophobic Free French leadership went out of their ways to make things difficult, even as French soldiers were lying in the unit’s beds. (I picked up a copy of 
, was published in 1956 when she was 70. She died in 1968 and Spears passed six years later.
The story of Hungry Mind/Ruminator Books is a parable of how far a passion for books can take you … until simple economics kick in. David Unowsky, who founded his independent bookstore, Hungry Mind Books, near the campus of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1970, and it acquired a reputation as one of a handful of truly great American bookstores. In the mid-1990s, he and his wife, Pearl Kilbride, along with other partners, started up an independent press, also known as Hungry Minds Books. Over the course of its nearly ten years’ existence, the press published 50 titles, with an emphasis on literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including a series of reissues of quality non-fiction under the rubrics of Hungry Mind Finds and Ruminator Finds.
The writing is what makes 
“In the summer of 1963 I bought a 1941 Lincoln limousine in New York, so that I might be chauffeur in California to the few remaining dignitaries in my family,” William Saroyan explains at the start of 
best-sellers, a book like 
and 
.
. The book was adapted for the screen as 
: “In a time when both Stephen King and satirical comedy are so popular, I don’t understand why this novel isn’t more well known.”
movie star of the 1920’s and ’30’s (he’s like Lon Chaney Sr. to the nth degree.) We learn of his fall from fame, and his attempted comeback in the phantasmagorical year of 1968. In his prime he made “Ghoulgantua”, the most terrifying film ever made (about a combination Frankenstein’s monster/vampire.) He created the famous monster “Gila Man” (a sort of werewolf lizard) during the war. Later he was blacklisted for political reasons, went to Germany to make a legendary, unreleased horror movie about the Nazi concentration camps that was supressed by both West and East Germany, and gradually sank into obscurity. Then low-budget Hollywood came calling with an offer to make a cheap Roger Corman-style Edgar Allen Poe rip-off titled “Raven!”
, a somewhat mystical tale of Blue Dog, a one-time chicken thief, was published by the admirable David R. Godine Press and is still in print.
, 
, and his memoir, 
. After decades of genuine neglect–books long out of print, periodic mentions by admiring fellow writers–Salter’s star has finally risen and one might fairly call him America’s best-known neglected writer. All of his books are back in print; he’s been a 
, which sparked a fair amount of controversy when it first appeared back in 1978. In th 
book, Gardner attempts to hold the high ground against contemporaries such as Bellow, Mailer, and the fearsome nouveau romans of 
and 
, had a certain cult classic status among college students back in the 1970s, although I suspect the sales had as much to do with the fine cover art by 
, a fierce retelling of the Beowulf tale from the perspective of the monster–a somewhat experimental piece more like shudder Barth’s 
than 
, that will maintain his artistic reputation.
Morley Callaghan is my favorite 20th-century novelist. His 
is among the best of memoirs. His writing is splendid, but he is forgotten. Every book lover can list authors who were wonderful and maybe even great (John Marquand, John Dos Passos, Erico Verissimo) but who are gone. Why do exceptional writers disappear?
In 
. Although I can’t imagine anyone finishing it and then thinking, “You know, I want to know even more about John Cheever,” it’s a remarkable work.
Gold lived in the same apartment building during one of the worst periods of Cheever’s life, when he was drinking himself to death during a teaching gig at Boston University. Gold, whose drinking problems were slightly more manageable than Cheever’s, had released a short story collection, 
, that did get published in 1969, but then struggled with alcoholism until he joined AA in 1976. Sobriety did not solve his writer’s block, though, and Gold only published one more book, 
, in 1992. 
Cheever met Kentfield during a stay in Hollywood in 1959 and the two men had a brief, intense affair that left Cheever paranoid about his homosexual feelings. Kentfield was a former Merchant Marine sailor whose most successful novel, 
Newhouse, who was born in Hungary, started out as a radical novelist whose 1934 novel about the down-and-out, 
, earned him the label, “the proletarian Hemingway.” But Newhouse quickly developed a much subtler sense of things and by the time he and Cheever met and their families shared an apartment house during World War Two, he was on a par with Cheever as one of the New Yorker’s most prolific short story writers. Although out of print for over 50 years now, Newhouse’s 1951 collection, 
. Cheever, however, considered Newhouse a sell-out, particularly for his 1954 novel, 
a try after coming across an enthusiastic Amazon.com review that called it “An Under-rated, lyrical ‘outsider-lit’ classic.” The reviewer, Benjamin N. Pierce, described the novel as,
is recounted in Mark Moskowitz’s film, 
Riffling realizes he is an Out-of-Sync, as is Miss Dunnette, the gorgeous red-headed librarian with whom he heads of on his journey. They soon locate Hafter’s former lover, Emma, a 70-year-old toker who still lives on the old farm where Hafter established Gallitzin College in the barn and pulled together a Utopian community of fellow Out-of-Syncs back in the 1920s. Fifty years ahead of its time, Hafter’s commune was awash in organic veggies, free love, and home-grown hemp, and everyone worshipped an enormous painting of a nude black woman with a sunflower bursting from her crotch.
won the National Book Award for that year and is still in print.
, which was, in part, about news coverage of the Vietnam War, and 
, are back in print from the Syracuse University Press. 
Published in 2007, 
is an attempt by Karl Bridges, librarian and associate professor at the University of Vermont’s 
(1797) to Charles T. Power’s