Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel
Page 21
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London WIT 3QT
OTHER NOVELS BY JAMES PURDY
Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue
Reaching Rose
Garments the Living Wear
In the Hollow of His Hand
On Glory’s Course
Mourners Below
Dream Palaces: Three Novels
Narrow Rooms
In a Shallow Grave
The House of the Solitary Maggot
I Am Elijah Thrush
Jeremy’s Version
Eustace Chisholm and the Works
The Nephew
Malcolm
Praise for Cabot Wright Begins
“James Purdy has succeeded better than anyone else around at the moment in re-creating the U.S.A. and presenting it simultaneously as his own invention and as a faithful reflection of reality—not an easy feat. Cabot Wright Begins is a delight all the way through.”
—Paul Bowles
“It might loosely be described as a bravura work of satire—a satire on pornographic fantasy, a satire on New York literary life, a satire on affluent eccentric mid-century America. Except that satire is perhaps too narrow a term to convey the kind of comedy that Purdy writes … but rather the vehicle for a universal comic vision.”
—Susan Sontag, New York Times Book Review
“His funniest novel.…Few modern novelists have refused so steadfastly to reproduce their last novel all over again, and Mr. Purdy’s courage in denying his admirers with another dose of the old familiar mixture seems to me justified by the regularity with which he produces unexpected yet unmistakably good Purdy products.”
—Angus Wilson, Observer
“Purdy builds his fiction like the hall of mirrors in a fun house. Which is the real image? One is never sure. Purdy’s vision of modern life has the bonecrushing savagery, the hallucinatory richness and total horror of a bad case of delirium tremens.”
—Conrad Knickerbocker, Life
“Here is a native Nabokov … it is a wildly funny book, beautifully written and with a deadly serious underlay.”
—Library Journal
“Cabot Wright Begins is not only the most savage of satires on the American way of life—or way of death, as Mr. Purdy would have it; it is an extremely funny book.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A brilliantly controlled spoof on American sexuality and book publishing.…In the end when Cabot Wright saves his sanity by rolling on the ground with laughter … it is a great moment in contemporary writing.”
—Theodore Solotaroff, Book Week