C of L49 More overarchingness re picaresque-like satire of

[Mark Kohut]

This novel was very popular in the sixties. It was in a cheap paperback edition. Edward Albee (mal)adapted it for the stage
to lots of attention but it failed. I read it then, although I remember few details. Without P's page-turning "hook", Oedipa is
not unlike Purdy's Malcolm. [Below is from a blogger writing in 2008!) I have often wondered whether TRP read it and would guess
Yes. (Of course, I usually assume he has read everything I know about, learn about--and more!) 
 
Whether he read it, it is worth knowing in the context of the times, yes?
 
Another reason I have wondered about this one and Purdy's next, The Nephew, is that THAT novel is 'about' a soldier who never comes home from the war. The novel begins with his absence. Remind you of anyone who disappeared in fiction in London in 1942?
 
 
Malcolm by James Purdy (1959) 
Malcolm is a novel which, because of its measured simplicity, is extraordinarily complex. It is a highly stylised fable in which the surreal is presented as entirely conventional. There is an extreme sense of disconnection, of alienation. This is a depiction of a society where the individual has lost his sense of belonging and where meaning has become arbitrary. It is also extremely funny.

The story begins in picaresque fashion, with Malcolm being introduced in successive chapters to a range of unusual individuals. Malcolm is first presented to us sitting on a bench day after day, waiting. Just waiting. 

Malcolm orbits these people’s worlds and everything shifts. Everything, that is, except Malcolm, who remains throughout impervious to the dramas building around him. Marriages disintegrate. Feuds and fights emerge. People fall out, break down. Yet all of this is told in a deliberately flat style, almost banal, and the characterization is strictly two-dimensional. The characters are established as stereotypes representing different aspects of American culture – philistines and aesthetes, revealing greed, neuroticism, irreality – and through their responses and lack of responses the hopelessness at the heart of American society is revealed.

The Nephew is almost pastoral, a slow, reflective look at small-town America and the pain of living in a world that moves too fast. ‘Exits and entrances’, a character tells us, that’s what mid-century America has brought, resulting in people ‘never being anywhere’.

But while, stylistically, the two novels are very different, this theme of life runing too fast reveals a definite commonality between them – and, indeed, it appears to be a theme which runs through Purdy’s entire oeuvre: we are again in the territory of disconnection, of a crucifying inability to communicate, of silent suffering and mutual incomprehension.
 
Purdy uses tears as a powerful metaphor for communication in the novel. Throughout, in conversations with the stoic Alma, characters are reduced to tears. Her friend Faye’s tears fall ‘ostentatiously to her cheeks and lips’ while Anna ‘dry-eyed’, looks away. Professor Mannheim weeps in ‘short almost animal-like sobs’. When news finally arrives of Cliff’s death, we are told:
As if to make up for Alma, who would not cry, the short controlled weeping of Mrs. Van Tassel broke the silence which had come after Alma’s speech, and then came the sudden broken sobs of Faye, and the quiet tears of Clara Himbaugh.

Me: One of TRPs deep, deep themes is "the pain of living in a world that moves too fast", yes? 
 
A--and, all those tears in C of L49................................
 
just wonderin'......'Great writers borrow", etc..... A---and, the best see the same, sea-changed.........................