Jeremy's Version

by James Purdy

Gore Vidal's 2005 feature profile of James Purdy in the Sunday New York Times Book Review signaled the long overdue arrival of a major literary cult hero into the American canon. Purdy is one of the last surviving, original, post-war pioneers of transgressive fiction—in line with the Beats, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, and John Rechy. Jeremy's Vision is the first volume of Purdy's Sleepers in Moon-Crowded Valleys trilogy. It is Purdy's classic novel about a dysfunctional Midwestern family and the struggle between two great dynasties, particularly among the women who rule them.

Genres: American Fiction, Fiction

369 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.
He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles.
Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation.
He worked as an interpreter, and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps one one of the greatest novels I have ever read - I adore Purdy and this is one of his masterpieces - in the five years before publishing this novel he wrote Eustace Chisholm and his works and Cabot Wright Begins and in the four years following it he wrote Elijah Thrush and The House of the Solitary Maggot. Five novels in less than ten years that are probably some of the greatest works in the English language.

The novel has been described as psychological fiction focusing on a dysfunctional Midwestern family, the Ferguses, and the overarching struggle between two great dynasties. The story is framed through the perspective of the young orphan Jeremy, enlisted by a retired opera singer to recount the tale of the families and their intertwined lives. But that says everything and nothing. It is one of many novels in which Purdy revisited the landscape of his mid-western youth particularly, Findlay, Ohio, where he grew up and went to school. It is also a novel in which the most powerful characters are women such as 'On Glory's Course' and it, and the other novels like it, are distaff version of the worlds he portrayed in works 'Narrow Rooms'.

As the first volume in a trilogy I want to leave making further comments until I have read 'The House of the Solitary Maggot' and 'Mourners Below'. But reading it again was as rich and wonderful an experience as reading any work by Purdy. He is incomparable.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slacker and more verbose than the other Purdys I've read, but as it's a kind of family epic in a 19th c. style (or at least un-modern), I suppose that's appropriate, and anyway I fell under its richly imagined very human spell and I'm more than happy to be introduced to another branch of his oeuvre, with more books to explore in his sleepers in moon-crowned valley series.

[Judy Vasseur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have the strange sensation of having just watched TV.

There's a kind of claustrophobic world here with people of all ages careening towards madness but somehow keeping to the daily drudgery of human tasks like laundry, meals, gardens. You endure a string of conversations, then something lurid and explosive happens.

The portraits are varied and interesting. There's Jethro, 14 year old survivor of grievous injury to head and neck writing in his accusatory journal and Winifred of sinewy arms who "should have been a man".

As much as I was disturbed by the violence in Daniel Woodrell’s Woe the Live On....here the blood-shed seemed more like entertainment. Kind of like the veneer that TV puts on drama. Or the bracing fisticuffs of a youthful night on the town. Strange.

This book grew on me about half way through—I began to enjoy the emotional outbursts, petty violence, long faces, pouting, plotting, shocking events. I can certainly understand why Purdy is a favorite of John Waters. Lurid, yes. But served up with some psychological meat and potatoes.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the decaying town of Boutflour, Rick Fergus’s mother is a whore and his long-gone father returns to borrow money. Head-damaged little brother logs every depravity in his journal. This knockout of a novel may leave the reader blissfully bug-eyed.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment. Very promising frame story and story skeleton. But very repetitive, also, boring. Coulda been shorter or ended more horrifically. The best parts were, of course, the phantasmagorical but scant descriptions of sex, violence, drunkenness, and reverse gender personation.