First Persons

by Austin Wright

KIRKUS REVIEWThe first person is the narrator who appears throughout, guiding the reader with one hand while throwing sand in his eyes with the other, since all of this is full of contrivances and connivances and interpolations designed to show that what one invents or experiences is perhaps the same thing. Author Wright is an English professor and so is timid Ralph Hathorne Burr who may or may not be the narrator after he becomes the ""protagonist of a novel about murder."" In fact, hypothecating here, deviating there, one is left wondering about the murder itself -- is it that of the old woman whom at first he stones, with fossils, in a wood -- Burnet Woods of course -- or a man who is killed at the same site or perhaps even his wife Cynthia, whom he permitted to die of her own hand? Other things do happen -- he becomes involved with a young woman half his age who fulfills his ""sectsual needs"" and then impels him to confess to a crime which of course she doesn't believe in -- and he has an almost fatal heart attack -- and, and, and, by the close you may find yourself lost in Burnet Woods with some of these mystifications. Wright also takes his chances with asides, or questions, ""which might tend to alienate the novel's readers. . . rather than evoking the kind of compassionate sympathy you no doubt would prefer."" Particularly with as prim a professorial type as Ralph Hathorne Burr. Much like Camden's Eye (1969).

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Austin McGiffert Wright was a novelist, literary critic and professor emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati.
He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, son of the geographer John Kirtland Wright and Katharine McGiffert Wright, and namesake of his uncle, Austin Tappan Wright, writer of the utopian novel, Islandia. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943. He served in the Army (1943–1946). He graduated from the University of Chicago, with a master's degree in 1948, and a Ph.D. in 1959.

He married Sara Hull Wright, in 1950. They had three children: Joanna Wright (died 2000), Katharine Wright of Berkeley, CA, and Margaret Wright, and two granddaughters, Madeline Giscombe and Elizabeth Perkins.

Reviews

[Katharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, this book is by my father and I read it when I was 22. It was his second novel but the first one of his that I read. I loved it. I was reading Robbe-Grillet at the time and I saw a kindred ethic. It made me laugh and scared me at the same time. I loved how it played with "reality" and with literary tropes. For instance, there is the (to me very funny) repetition of descriptions of the body, playing through all the cliches about finding/moving a body.
It was a bit unnerving reading stuff that overlapped to a degree with the life around me--we had been recovering from "the Cincinnati strangler" (who had murdered one of our neighbors) and the book echoes that. Burnet Woods is named--I went there all the time with my dog. But I digress...
I recommend this title to fans of Paul Auster and other authors who play with the whole idea of authorship, reading, literary conventions, etc. while at the same time holding you rapt in a story.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Persons starts with a murder: Ralph Burr, an English professor, murders an old woman in a park for no apparent reason. Or was it an old man? Or did it really happen? He worries about getting caught, tries to confess at times, occasionally channels Crime and Punishment (Raskolnikov is explicitly mentioned at one point). Burr halfheartedly campaigns to become department chair and also engages in an odd relationship with a department secretary twenty years his junior. There is a lot of tension between the expectations of literary tradition and of reality. There are continual shifts from third person narrator to first person singular to first person plural (Burr and the narrator, with occasional discussions between them). Sometimes Burr is consciously a character in a novel. Events are repeated with varying details, concentric circles that keep repeating. At one point a character observes "Well maybe that's his point, that you really can't tell the difference between what's imaginary and what's real."

I first read this when it was new, in the seventies, when I was an undergraduate at Cincinnati, where Wright was a professor. He never identifies the university, but doesn't hide it (e.g., Burnet Woods, Clifton, McMicken Hall, etc.). There actually was a murder in Burnet Woods around that time. Much of what I enjoyed in the book was nostalgia, picturing people and places from the Clifton and UC of the seventies. Thomas Wolfe may have been right that you can't go back (everything has changed), but you can in fiction.