Brossard Is Back
Brady, Susan
Brossard Is Back by Susan Brady After an eight-year silence, broken by occasional signs of life in anthologies and magazines, Chandler Brossard is finally getting oft the newsstands and back into...
...Then, just as on the stage the archer made his great spring, they saw a bearded Negro sprinting down the aisle pursued by two ushers...
...He has no past and no future...
...Brossard Is Back by Susan Brady After an eight-year silence, broken by occasional signs of life in anthologies and magazines, Chandler Brossard is finally getting oft the newsstands and back into the bookstores with his third novel, The Double View (Dial...
...For the rest ol us, the book can stand as a rich, sharp, wondrously funny commentary on the way we live now...
...His wife Janine and friend Rand (also Janine's lover) are borderline cases and are, in the end, saved from destruction through the mercy of Carter, who does sometimes seem to be standing in for the Son of God...
...But whatever bizarre events he chooses to detail, Brossard never loses sight of his subject: modern, urban man who, devoid of love and faith, is cut off from God, from his fellow man, and consequently from himself...
...188 pp...
...Brossard eschews the tricks of the writer in a hurry, depending instead on his own sure eye and sound ear for descriptions and dialogue...
...Phillips, a sentimental and parasitic few...
...Prominent in Brossard's gallery ol such grotesques are Margaret, a sexually aberrant heiress...
...Christopher Hawkins, ;i white Negro intellectual...
...Although The Double View contains numerous religious allusions, the statement of their meaning is best left to those literary theologians who cut their baby teeth on T. S. Eliot...
...In the present, he has no identity...
...One usher grabbed at the demonic figure, but pulled only his black cape off, and the Negro leaped free, looking, in his white skin-tight suit, like one of the dancers, and then as he leaped high and wildly from the grabbing hands the orchestra roared in, and it seemed to the audience, for a stricken second, that this was a maniacal addition to the ballet itself...
...The only character with all his buttons is Carter Barrows, who views the world from the psycho ward of a city hospital...
...It is a short, hard book, carefully and economically put together, and in it he develops his story of a group of New Yorkers with nightmarish clarity and dramatic force up to a smasheroo ending rivaling that of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust...
...Harry-Eddie Brien, the commentator who doubles as a Bronx tough guy, and Shanley, a faceless hood, "a single dealer of infinite simplicity...
...3.50...
...The result is vivid prose and, when the author permits the full play of his wild sense of humor, the effect is memorable as in this passage describing an incident during a performance of Swan Lake: "In this exquisitely suspended pause, this most fragile hiatus, the audience was suddenly distracted by strange wild cries coming from the back of the theater...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
