Review by New York Times Review
JAMES PURDY, who died in 2009, was so often declared an underappreciated American genius on the basis of his first few novels that it is easy to forget about the later decades of his writing, which were often appreciated not at all. While the early stuff continued to attract admirers (including Jonathan Franzen, who called Purdy's 1967 novel "Eustace Chisholm and the Works" "so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring"), he drew diminishing interest both from American publishers, who took on his later books only after they were published overseas, and from reviewers, who often ignored them entirely. "The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy," which includes two novellas, brings together old and new in one twisted, occasionally surreal burlesque, spanning roughly six decades and held together by that oddly formal voice that seems to belong to none of them. Stories materialize as if from dreams. One begins: "Pearl Miranda walked stark naked from her classroom in the George Washington School where she taught the eighth grade, down Locust Street, where she waited until some of the cars which had stopped for a red traffic light had driven on, then hurried as fast as her weight could allow her down Smith Avenue." As is typical of Purdy, the woman's true sexual humiliation comes not from her nudity, but from the act of explaining how she got that way, which causes her to sputter and twist through the length of the story. Her shame is internal and surfaces only after she is dressed. This is the Purdy method: dispense with externals to get at more interior sins. He dealt in myths and universale, not daily reality. Many of the earliest stories are little more than dialogues; the later ones include cracked fairy tales involving cannibals or talking cats. This "tell don't show" can make the prose feel antique or overeager, but it also creates space for Purdy's dark humor. We know the universale he invokes. "It was one of those fake dead long parties where nobody actually knows anybody and where people could be pushed out of windows without anybody's being sure until the morrow," he writes in a tautly nasty story about a woman who can't stand her married name. Haven't we all been to this fake dead party? Instead of reconstructing the dull chatter, Purdy veers toward more fundamental rot, which at first appears to be the woman's resentment, but then finds a darker spot, when the husband hits her in the face in the midst of the party, then knocks her down on the pavement outside. "Immediately then she struck Frank with the purse and he fell back in surprise against the building wall," Purdy writes. "'Call me a cab, you cheap son of a bitch,' she said. 'Can't you see I'm bleeding?'" The characters in these stories, old or recent, are missing something: parents abandon children; husbands abandon wives; a man searches for his former lover in derelict porn theaters; two brothers live in an abandoned "notright house" on Chicago's South Side; a disgraced New York hostess fellates a writer in front of a roomful of people to regain her position on the salon circuit. If you don't know the term "grass widow," for a divorced or abandoned woman, Purdy will correct that omission. Whatever his characters are searching for, rest assured that they won't find it, or that if they do it will bring them only more damage. PURDY'S characters never question the fallen state of the world in which they find themselves or the terrible things done to or by otherwise unexceptional individuals. The author makes no claims that they deserve better, or that problems are there to be solved. Even in the more naturalistic stories, violence and sexual compulsion, gay and straight, are part of the background music. Maliciousness is just another word for manners. "I could tell you things," one woman tells another about a rich acquaintance, "but we're here in a beautiful tidy house with such wonderful things to eat. I won't." Reader, have no fear: She will; oh, she will. The collection has its faults. Purdy's depictions of black life, of which he was proud, have not aged well, and his later fables of dragons and cats lack the strained humanity of his better work. But a wonderful late story provides an apt coda for an author who spoke in interviews about his small readership. In "Reaching Rose," an elderly man in a bar uses the pay phone to make nightly calls to no one. He is, like his creator, a voice without an audience. When, after a distressing remark from the bartender, he finally dials an old friend, the connection possibly kills him. A coda to the coda: The story was published in England in 2000, and in the United States in 2004. The book it appeared in is now out of print. In these stories, violence and sexual compulsion are part of the background music. John Leland, a reporter at The Times, is the author of "Hip: The History" and "Why Kerouac Matters."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 25, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Purdy's gift for capturing the despair in people's lives is abundantly present in this collection of 58 stories. A wife's disdain for her husband is exemplified in her lack of confidence that he can change a refrigerator's lightbulb, in "Man and Wife." The doctor of "Ruthanna Elder," who has delivered more than 2,000 babies, attributes his insomnia to "too meticulous a memory of the subsequent lives" they led, which weighed on him like "slabs from the stone quarry." Purdy can sum up a character in a phrase-a college acquaintance seen two decades later is described as having a body "so loose and yet heavy as though the passions and anguish of man had never coursed through it." When he's at his best, his brief glimpses into troubled lives are painful to read. He's less successful when he tries his hand at fables; entries like "Mud Toe the Cannibal" and "Kitty Blue" are unremarkable. Noir fans who like nothing better than to peer into the windows of broken souls but don't need blood to enjoy the view will agree with Waters's note in his introduction that this complete volume ("here they all are at last") of "perfectly perverted" stories is a treasure. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The late (19142009) fiction writer, whose work sharply divided critical opinion from the start, receives his due with this vast but fast-moving collection of short stories. Dip into the book, counsels fugitive filmmaker John Waters in his introduction, and you'll find "a perfectly perverted Purdy story," one that, he adds, will yield "hilarious moral damage and beautiful decay that will certainly follow in your dreams." The description seems apt, though Purdy's themes, sometimes homoerotic and sometimes obsessive, transcend the merely sexual: Waters' word "perverted" might more closely track Purdy's gloomy, angry, mistrustful sense of the world. His characters are often argumentative, bitter, unhappy, full of malign intent. In one particularly unpleasant example, a woman awakens as if from a dream to decide that after years of married life she cannot stand her husband's name--and by extension, her husband. He repays the sentiment by hitting her "not too gently over the mouth," making her bleed and drawing a crowd. In another, a young man murders a "young uncle" for what he considers good cause and then shoots himself: "his brains and pieces of skull rushed out from under his fair curly hair onto the glass behind the pillars, onto the screen door, the blood flew like a gentle summer shower." In yet another, a less violent Chekhov pastiche, a swindle takes flight as a "whim of Fortune," ruinous for some and a boon for others. You'll either be enchanted or repelled, and Purdy seems to occupy no middle ground: Whereas Jonathan Franzen has championed him, Edmund White has professed to be "allergic" to Purdy's work. A bonus: Several of the stories are previously unpublished, some by design. A completist's dream, as well as a comprehensive overview of Purdy's themes and--yes--obsessions.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
