The Mumpsimus

  After posting my thoughts on Michael Snyder's new biography of James Purdy, I got questions from friends who were interested in this writer they had never heard of and wondered where to start. Here, then, some quick recommendations... First, I don't think you can really go terribly wrong by just picking up whatever work by Purdy happens to be most easily available to you. He had plenty of range as a writer — more than he is often given credit for — but though I have not quite read all the novels, I have yet to feel there's a big range in quality there, with some novels great highs and others terrible lows (I think the range of quality in his short stories is bigger, as well as his plays; I have not read enough of his poetry to judge that yet). This makes recommendations easy, because if you like one Purdy novel, you will probably like them all to some extent, and if you dislike one Purdy novel, there's a very good chance he is not a writer for you — though it's a...

  In the 1960s, James Purdy’s writing was celebrated by such writers as Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and Paul Bowles. His first novel, Malcolm , was adapted as a Broadway play by Edward Albee. In 1964, Susan Sontag said that “anything Purdy writes is a literary event of importance”. On the cover of Tony Tanner’s 1971 study of contemporary writers, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970, Purdy’s name is prominently written alongside Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; Tanner argues that Purdy’s 1965 novel Cabot Wright Begins is “one of the most important novels since the war.” Through the rest of the 20th century, Purdy published a new book every year or two, but those books garnered fewer and fewer reviews, sold fewer and fewer copies, and by the end of the 1980s much of his work was out of print and his new writings were published by small presses. Even as queer writers—especially white gay male writers like Purdy—were finding success with mainstr...

In writing about Brian Evenson's book about Raymond Carver, I noted that both Evenson and I first read Carver right around the time we first read Kafka and Beckett, and we did so without knowledge of the contemporary American fiction writers he's often set alongside (e.g. Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, etc.). Later, I gained that context and, consequently, the context I'd originally brought faded, which is one reason why Brian's book so effectively brought Carver back to me — which is to say, it brought a way of reading Carver back to me. I don't mind the American writers Carver typically gets grouped with, but I'd be lying if I said their work really excites me. Kafka and Beckett, on the other hand, are among a very small group of 20th century writers whose work I am in awe of, work that I feel utterly incapable of writing about analytically, work that I can only point to and say, " That . Whatever great literature is, it must surely be that ." Now,...

At the end of my recent post about Raymond Carver *, I noted, via Brian Evenson's excellent book on Carver , the influence of James Purdy on Carver and Gordon Lish, an influence I hadn't paid attention to before. Coincidental to my rereading of Carver, I picked up a copy of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy . Over the years, I've read and enjoyed (or at least admired) a number of Purdy's novels, but only a couple of his stories. Roaming around in The Complete Short Stories , I was stunned, overwhelmed. It was a similar feeling as I had when I first picked up The Complete Stories  of Clarice Lispector — an impression of a vast, original, surprising oeuvre  revealed and tantalizing, like standing at the edge of an extraordinary landscape: knowing that what is in front of you is unlike anything you've seen before, and that more wonder lies on the other side of the horizon. There's more in Purdy's Complete Stories  than I have time or inclinati...