False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

In the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher’s astounding first novel examines a young man’s detachment from the world—and his struggle to rejoin it


Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again. He testifies against the Klan in the Deep South, joins the navy during World War II, experiences love, and eventually finds his way back to England as an entirely changed man.

Genres: Fiction

484 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Hortense 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.

Reviews

[Heidi Wills · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the style of Conrad Aiken, George Perec...florid, stream of consciousness writing. The tale is told poetically rather than in typical story fashion.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Long, ambitious, intensely literary, very knotty at the sentence-by-sentence level, and I wish I could say that it all worked, but there seems to be a lack of direction (to put it mildly) and ultimately I just didn’t see the point. I did persevere to the end, though.