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Standard Dreaming
Standard Hortense Standard Arbor FIRST First Edition, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by Arbor House, 1972. Octavo with blue top stain. Hardcover. Signed (flat) by the author on the half title page. Book is very good with light toning to the page ends. Dust jacket is very good with very light edgewear. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 323541 Literature We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!
- GenresFiction
127 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
7 people want to read
About the author
Hortense Calisher
79 books11 followersHortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction.
Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.
Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 14, 2025
For a book this short, “Standard Dreaming” drags itself along like it’s pulling a caravan of ennui behind it. I’ve read municipal signage that left a more lasting emotional imprint.
Divorced, estranged, and apparently allergic to meaningful human contact, Berners drifts through life in a fug of clinical detachment and vague self-pity. His secretary engages him in what can only be described as administrative murmurs, and his son, Raoul, quite sensibly loathes him. I’m with Raoul on this one.
There is, theoretically, a plot. Berners belongs to a support group of washed-up parents abandoned by their children and has decided that this generational estrangement signals the decline of the species. It’s a hefty claim and might have landed if the novel itself had any pulse.
Calishers renders it with such ponderous solemnity that even the more intriguing ideas collapse under the weight of their own abstraction.
Fine words butter no parsnips, and here they’re slathered everywhere to little effect. The prose has a faintly affected shimmer, as though hoping you won’t notice that absolutely nothing of consequence is happening. Is this really occurring, or is it all a dream? If it’s the latter, it’s the kind of dream you wake from wondering if you left the oven on, then forget about entirely.
It’s also maddeningly slow. Not dreamlike, not contemplative, just inert. A still life of a man sulking in a mid-century armchair, muttering thinly about extinction while waiting for his secretary to rebook a colonoscopy. At one point, I genuinely considered abandoning the book in favour of alphabetising my receipts.
If the book had been sharper, funnier, or even just weirder, it might have got somewhere. As it is, “Standard Dreaming” reads like the literary equivalent of white noise. This isn’t just meandering, it’s narcotised. A reverie with all the urgency of damp toast and about as much flavour. It ends - eventually, blessedly - with nothing much resolved, but by then, I’d lost the will to care.
Divorced, estranged, and apparently allergic to meaningful human contact, Berners drifts through life in a fug of clinical detachment and vague self-pity. His secretary engages him in what can only be described as administrative murmurs, and his son, Raoul, quite sensibly loathes him. I’m with Raoul on this one.
There is, theoretically, a plot. Berners belongs to a support group of washed-up parents abandoned by their children and has decided that this generational estrangement signals the decline of the species. It’s a hefty claim and might have landed if the novel itself had any pulse.
Calishers renders it with such ponderous solemnity that even the more intriguing ideas collapse under the weight of their own abstraction.
Fine words butter no parsnips, and here they’re slathered everywhere to little effect. The prose has a faintly affected shimmer, as though hoping you won’t notice that absolutely nothing of consequence is happening. Is this really occurring, or is it all a dream? If it’s the latter, it’s the kind of dream you wake from wondering if you left the oven on, then forget about entirely.
It’s also maddeningly slow. Not dreamlike, not contemplative, just inert. A still life of a man sulking in a mid-century armchair, muttering thinly about extinction while waiting for his secretary to rebook a colonoscopy. At one point, I genuinely considered abandoning the book in favour of alphabetising my receipts.
If the book had been sharper, funnier, or even just weirder, it might have got somewhere. As it is, “Standard Dreaming” reads like the literary equivalent of white noise. This isn’t just meandering, it’s narcotised. A reverie with all the urgency of damp toast and about as much flavour. It ends - eventually, blessedly - with nothing much resolved, but by then, I’d lost the will to care.
December 17, 2016
Brilliant but not entirely accessible.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews