Mourners Below

by James Purdy

Book by James Purdy

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Repressed and aloof attorney Eugene Bledsoe and his youngest son Duane struggle in vastly different ways with grief over the deaths in battle of the family’s two older boys—Douglas and Justin—as they slowly discover the secret life Justin was leading prior to his enlistment. Beyond grief, themes included fatherhood, coming-of-age, love, family and class dynamics, and small town life. Transitioning from reading Purdy’s Narrow Rooms to this novel was like running a brisk mile down the beach with the wind at one’s back before suddenly veering into the turbid sea while attempting to maintain the same pace. The plot here plods forward like a sick tortoise, driven largely by dialogue and constant rehashing of emotional turmoil. While the tension builds a bit toward the end, by then the effect is diminished to the point where as a reader it felt like dragging oneself out of a bog rather than scaling the peak of a mountain. It’s not a bad novel, nor is it uninteresting, per se. But it’s very different from the rapid-fire transgressive savagery of Narrow Rooms and, to a lesser extent, In a Shallow Grave. In fact, from what I’ve read of his work so far, it seems like maybe there were two versions of James Purdy: one writing mainstream-ish literary fiction in an attempt to pay the bills and the other exorcising disfigured demon prose onto the page from a dark pit inside himself. Of course, I prefer the latter, but that’s not to say I think the former isn’t worth reading. It’s just probably not wise to read the two versions back-to-back, as I did. My saving grace in the experience of reading Mourners Below was picturing Eugene Bledsoe as Eugene Levy in the role of Johnny Rose in the TV series Schitt’s Creek. Their characters are remarkably similar, which makes the resemblance between their names even more uncanny.

[Djrmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A seventeen year old boy deals with the death of the brothers he idolized, a father that refuses to mourn, and the misplaced love of people all around him. In almost all of Purdy's books that I've read, his protagonists beg for sympathy. This is one of the rare times I felt like they deserved it.

[Keith zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Eerie, arch, angry, fantastic, mundane, contrived, astute, sinister, pleading, beautiful, ugly, sad, elegiac and an awestruck giggle-a-minute. A document of people who need love desperately and who do not know how to love each other. Truly strange and nearly perfect.

[Liam Ostermann]

From the New York Times in 1981 on first publication:

"...The story is deceptively simple. It's a kind of battlefield where the living play dead, and the dead begin to warp those ''mourners below.'' Most of the novel exists in that lost hour ''between very late and very early.'' This has always been the strength of Mr. Purdy's writing. He cuts below the skin and doesn't become involved with the sociology of any particular time or place. He uses locale to isolate hysteria and deal with that terrible anger of being unloved. The rhythms of his prose have nothing to do with mimicry, or the rendering of American speech. He has never sought to be a caricaturist, to parody the best or the worst of our lives. That slight awkwardness of Mr. Purdy's corrosive style, the deadpan electricity his characters speak with is the crazy jumping sound of the heart's own music.

"James Purdy is one of the very best writers we have. He exists in some strange limbo between adoration and neglect. His books are ''noticed,'' but they are rarely celebrated the way they should be. Perhaps this is because Mr. Purdy doesn't play the peacock in his books or strut around with his talents. You have to peek under the feathers to catch the wildness of his prose."

Full review at: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/bo.... Not behind a paywall but access is not without effort.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't get Purdy. Maybe I'm too old or something.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great expectations’ but the gothic tone of the book has now infected the prose and have all the odd elements of it cranked up in a radiation room until we hit fever dream like levels and you probably end up with sometjing along the lines of this book. Despite possibly being the most strange of the Purdy’s I’ve read the oddball and taboo which I thnk sometimes takes too much centre stage in other novels doesn’t overbear the story but enhances it, especially the characters who are by far some of Purdy’a most memorable creations.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I make my way through the Purdy canon, this is my favorite book so far. Duane is somewhat like Malcolm and the subject matter is similar to The Nephew. Still, there is maturity in the writing that I did not see in the other books.