Forty Whacks

by Fanny Howe

1971. No Edition Remarks. 195 pages. No dust jacket. This is an ex-Library book. Red cloth with gilt lettering. Ex-library copy, with expected inserts and inscriptions. Light foxing and tanning to pages. More prominent to text block edges, pastedowns and free endpapers. Binding is slightly loose with mild creasing to gutters but pages remain attached. Boards have minor corner bumping and edgewear with mild tanning and scuffing overall. Spine has light tanning with soft crushing to ends. Lettering remains bright and clear. Book has a slight forward lean.

195 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is presumably a reference to Lizzie Borden (Angela Carter's treatment being most memorable) who as we know took an axe.... The fascination being that the act was without any apparent motive. She's a fair avatar for these stories, then, largely of relationships, dissolving or broken from the start, squirming with quiet desperation, with women protagonists who carelessly sow destruction in their own or others' lives. The acts are their own, but the malaise, as ever, is societal.

While this isn't anything as exhilarating as the experimental collage road novel of Holy Smoke, which Howe wrote for Fiction Collective ten years later, it does confirm her as a sharp cynical observer and most of these, particularly the closing novella "Dump Gull", will linger in my mind. This last, with its briskly rendered locations across America and images of a time when marriage was a form of flirtation, being nearly enough to tip this up into 4 stars, but I realize I'd probably be less obsessed if I came at this without Holy Smoke for context. Still good though.

[Judy]

READ AGAIN 8/5/85