Flamingo

by Mary Borden

Genres: Fiction

414 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Mary Borden (1886–1968) was an early 20th-century, Anglo-American novelist.

Mary Borden was born into a wealthy Chicago family. She attended Vassar College, graduating with a B.A. in 1907. In 1908 she married George Douglas Turner, with whom she had three daughters; Joyce (born 1909), Comfort (born 1910) and Mary (born 1914). She was living in England in 1914 at the outbreak of the war and used her own money to equip and staff a field hospital close to the Front in which she herself served as a nurse from 1915 until the end of the war. It was there she met Brigadier General Edward Louis Spears, who became her second husband, in 1918, following the dissolution of her first marriage. Despite her considerable social commitments as the wife of a prominent diplomat, she continued a successful career as a writer. During her war-time experience she wrote poetry such as 'The Song of the Mud' (1917). Notably, her work includes a striking set of sketches and short stories, The Forbidden Zone (1929), which was published in the same year as A Farewell to Arms, Good-Bye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front. Even in this context, contemporary readers were disturbed at the graphic, sometimes hallucinatory, quality of this work coming from a woman's pen.

Her 1937 novel Action for Slander was adapted into a film the same year.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

“He sees New York as a city of three layers. His working life is lived in the air, on the top layer; his married life goes on down on the ground or near it, in the smart world where his wife’s set skim about in ballrooms or up and down smooth roads to Long Island. Below this there is another world, subterranean, the world of blazing night cellars, where the negroes gather, and this world too draws him irresistibly down into it...He goes back and back to that black continent, that subterranean Africa blazing under the city’s pavement. All sorts of architectural concepts sprout up in his mind in that Jazz jungle.”

I was happy to have an original copy of this forgotten novel on my shelves – and if I had not made the mistake of reading it, I would still be happy now.

It’s an ambitious tale centred around a young American architect in love with skyscrapers and it probably seeks to contrast the vitality and exuberance of 1920s New York with the stodgy conservatism of England – “that old woman across the Atlantic”, the homely values of rural New England, and the sham values of the arrogant nouveau riche. Something like that.

Unfortunately it’s a structural mess, despite its architectural theme. Worse still, the writing – which might be tolerable for a jaunty recipe book – seems to hit all the wrong notes. Don’t even ask about plot, dialogue, and characters... Halfway through, I could take no more.

Mary Borden had a gay, insouciant, 1920s attitude to racial epithets which would make many modern readers reach for their smelling salts, even though she was celebrating – up to a point – the cosmopolitan mix of New York. Something of the scurrying, towering, electric vitality of the city comes through, despite the prose, and these impressionistic descriptions are substantially the best part of Flamingo. But as for the rest...

[Neglectedbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways, the most ambitious American novel of the late 1920s after John Dos Passos' U.S.A.. It's like Bonfire of the Vanities set in Jazz Age Manhattan, and it's rich with descriptive passages about skyscrapers, jazz clubs, boardroom politics and high society weekend parties. Unfortunately, the book rests upon a paper-thin core story and a protagonist whose own long-lost love calls him "a great artist but a weak little man." Despite its faults, however, it's long overdue for reissue. Out of print since 1927. Read more at the Neglected Books Page.