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The Wolf Leaps
Book by Brossard, Chandler
142 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
37 people want to read
About the author
Chandler Brossard
37 books21 followersChandler Brossard was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher. He wrote or edited a total of 17 books. With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States. His novels were more appreciated in France and Great Britain.
His early works have been described as "landmarks of the postwar American novel."
His early works have been described as "landmarks of the postwar American novel."
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 30, 2021
I wrote the summary...which may not have appeared because the title of Zachary Tanner's introduction is 'Sure, Christ Fucked, but Was He on Top?' The best yet of Tanner's three Brossard introductions, it is followed by a foreward by Steven Moore that was written 20 years ago for a reprint of the book that never appeared. In this novel Brossard displays his utter disregard for sensitivites regarding race, gender, religion, and sexual preference, characteristic of his later books in which he displays free style writing underscored by a brilliance unmatched in the last decades of the 20th century: his disregard is for squeamish readers, not humanity, which has found itself in a predicament he understood before readers knew what he was up to. Written in the early 1960s, The Wolf Leaps, is indicative of his decision to disregard the literary conventions of his time and embark on a mad spree described in a 1962 excerpt Moore mentions in his foreward headed "A razor-slice of life in the raw from Chandler Brossard's The Wolf Leaps." Eleven years later, Brossard received some indication of his fate when this novel was published as Did Christ Make Love? by Bobbs-Merrill, believe it or not.
The novel tells of white man of the cloth Harrison, who seeks an escape from suburbia into life by taking up an assignment in Spanish Harlem, where perhaps timid editors at BM worried that readers would surely assign the role of wolf to Harrison, rather than perhaps his wife Leslie (was she a lesbian?), the hooker Monique (was she a mother wolf leaping toward freedom?), her pimp Dancer (a conventional alpha?) or the pack of black and Hispanic cast of characters enlivening a neighborhood where poverty proved far less deadening than the culturally vacant living space created for those with the money to seek distance from such lives.
The novel tells of white man of the cloth Harrison, who seeks an escape from suburbia into life by taking up an assignment in Spanish Harlem, where perhaps timid editors at BM worried that readers would surely assign the role of wolf to Harrison, rather than perhaps his wife Leslie (was she a lesbian?), the hooker Monique (was she a mother wolf leaping toward freedom?), her pimp Dancer (a conventional alpha?) or the pack of black and Hispanic cast of characters enlivening a neighborhood where poverty proved far less deadening than the culturally vacant living space created for those with the money to seek distance from such lives.
December 29, 2021
This is my first Brossard. A great introduction to an author!
The Wolf Leaps is a tragic story with a handful of characters. The reader bounces back through the lives of characters and are all exquisitely intertwined.
Harrison, a guilt-ridden priest finds solace in a prostitute named Monique. Harrison wants to leave his wife Leslie. Monique wants to escape the grip of her pimp named Dancer. The two main (I would say) characters fall in love and in the heat of their love, ultimately ends tragically.
What I enjoyed most about this book want the amount of liberation each character achieves throughout the novel. Everyone is looking for a place to be happy. Even if it’s not with their partners.
It’s gripping. It’s sexy. Its sneaky. It’s kind of campy in the best way.
This can be read in a single sitting. Great for a flight or in a waiting room.
The Wolf Leaps is a tragic story with a handful of characters. The reader bounces back through the lives of characters and are all exquisitely intertwined.
Harrison, a guilt-ridden priest finds solace in a prostitute named Monique. Harrison wants to leave his wife Leslie. Monique wants to escape the grip of her pimp named Dancer. The two main (I would say) characters fall in love and in the heat of their love, ultimately ends tragically.
What I enjoyed most about this book want the amount of liberation each character achieves throughout the novel. Everyone is looking for a place to be happy. Even if it’s not with their partners.
It’s gripping. It’s sexy. Its sneaky. It’s kind of campy in the best way.
This can be read in a single sitting. Great for a flight or in a waiting room.
September 7, 2021
I first read Did Christ Make Love? in February of 2021 in the middle of a six-month study of Brossard that I was undertaking while writing my introductions to the corona\samizdat reprints of Brossard’s two mammoth novels, Wake Up. We’re Almost There and As the Wolf Howls at My Door. In light of my scholarly endeavor, I bought all the Brossard I could get my hands on, my copy of Did Christ Make Love? (1973) a signed HCDJ 1st ED which I purchased for $59.65, which was the only copy I could find on the internet. (As I write this introduction, I can find absolutely no copies online.) I read it over the course of an afternoon, most likely over three or four tequila-ice-limes, for I was drinking heavily while on antidepressants at the time, which I would not mention but to note that the liberated imagination of Chandler Brossard’s fiction was essential to my recovery.
At this point, I was about nine months into my daily ongoing conversation with Rick Harsch, who had introduced me to Brossard but a few months before when he asked me to introduce his paperback edition of Wake Up. Like I said, I read this book in one inebriated sitting, not counting the trips from my shed to the kitchen and back, and when I put it down, I likely sent a rough snapshot of my blurry, sweating mason jar next to the book with something along the lines of “not true what they say, Brossard can write a plot, and better than the rest, as well as the Bard himself.” I gushed about the book until it was time to move on with my day, thinking little of it but of my next drink, which would taste sweeter thanks to the afterglow of reading a novel, but within the hour, Rick had written the Estate:
The person working on the introduction to Wolf has told me that we should publish Did Christ Make Love. Can I have your permission?
Soon after, Rick wrote Steven Moore (who had been providing guest editorial directions on behalf of his friend Chandler for us since we reprinted Raging Joys, Sublime Violations) about our edition of this book and he said:
“That’s great news about Did Christ Make Love?, though I hope you will use Bross-ard's original and preferred title, The Wolf Leaps.”
He also passed along a copy of a Foreword he wrote “for an edition that was supposed to come out 20 years ago but didn't,” which has remained unpublished until now, in which he refers to The Wolf Leaps as “the least known of Brossard’s novels, the scarcest on the used-book market, and the only one not to have been reprinted as a paperback in his lifetime.”
Why is that the case? Beyond the fact that all of Brossard’s work was and has remained neglected? Does it have to do with “the only crime worse than marrying your mother and murdering your father?” Or because it’s a novel in which white merry wives of priests invite sapphic black parishioners up to their apartment under the guise of a half-baked pretense, and, as they are tempting them into hardly verbally consensual sex-massages, have the caucacity to say something like
“And just think how nice it must be, Cynthia, how almost unnaturally blissful, not to be wakened in the middle of the night by the screams of people being mugged or raped or beaten to death in a race riot, Mm, heaven.”
What is the crime worse than Oedipus’s? Why, the star-crossed trysting of a white priest and a black hustler.
And yes, star-crossed, again, as I drunken-ly tried to convey to Rick with my choice of the word Bard, for it is the dramatism of this novel that makes it a novel novel. In his note “To the Reader” in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom writes:
In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.
What is the crux in this crucifix of a novel but the moment that Rojas later recalls as Harrison giving “the distinct impression he was carrying on a most impassioned and urgent interior dialogue with his two warring selves.”
When on the pulpit, our white Jesus has his epiphany amidst some of the most sublime writing in the entire novel:
“I wonder how many of us really know what it means to believe, what the vast implications are of believing. I suspect that many of us either have the wrong understanding of this, or at least are not as actually involved in it as we should be. For example, what does it mean when we say that we believe in another person? Does this mean merely that we know this person won’t lie to us, or try to steal our money? That we are sure this person will be nice to us? If that is all we mean, then we might as well give up. Because belief in another human being means infinitely more than that. It means that we accept his infinite capacities for becoming an extraordinary person, for rising above the limitations we see before us. Belief, real belief, between two people is a kind of magic. With this God-given magic there is nothing they cannot do, nothing they cannot feel, nothing they cannot create. A human paradise comes into existence, a realm of feeling and liberty, without which we are nothing but self-deluded sleepwalkers.”
What more fertile consciousness moment for Shakespearean self-overhearing than the sermonizer on the mount? The beauty of this book is self-evident.
My initial enthusiasm for the jouissance of The Wolf Leaps came from the place in my heart that cherishes William T. Vollmann’s O’Farrell Street hagiographies. And from a narratological standpoint, Did Christ Make Love? (for as such did I know it) had it all: striking monologue-based, flashback-driven non-linearity condensed into a zip-bang tragicomic structure, fluid peripeteia and a delayed anagnorisis, the libertine duplicity of a cast of characters each thinking of other lovers than the ones they are obligated to love, with several dying from their taboo affections while we see directly inside each of their idiosyncratic thoughtspeech peregrinations according to the narrator’s whim, and ultimately, by it all, the soft, full frontal love that is so uncommon in the 21st century, of which wrote Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius, whose timeless eroticism Brossard as Bard seemed to adopt under the guise of modernism, i.e. the quoted monologue. As with The Double View, The Wolf Leaps represented a wild diversion from early Brossard that paved the way for later Brossard while they both remained distinct from the rest for their mature flirtation with free indirect style and clever plotting. As Dorrit Cohn writes in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness:
A monologuist in a third-person context is not the uniquely dominant voice in the text we read. He is always more or less subordinated to the narrator, and our evaluation of what he says to himself remains tied to the perspective (neutral or opiniated, friendly or hostile, empathic or ironic) into which the narrator places him for us.
I doubt more need be said to bait some wayfaring scholar out there to unpack this thing for us once and for all, but until such time please take a long look at the following two ephemera I have created (with obvious limitations in the approximations of the latter as such considerations as characters’ ages and therefore the sequence of their individual adolescent escapades are unknowable to me; I have done the best I can with what I have in order to make this unique novel’s idiosyncratic complexity evident at a glance):
Dramatis Personae
Harrison—episcopal priest
Monique—hustler
Dancer—her pimp
Rojas—concerned parishioner
Elaine—Rojas’s betrothed
Leslie—wife of Harrison
Cynthia—lover of wife of Harrison
Alba—waitress-turned-hustler (thanks to Dancer)
Alba’s Boyfriend
FABULA SEQUENCE:
GG, V, Y, R, H, E, A, B, C, D, F, G, I, J, L, Q, CC, M, N, O, U, P, BB, S, T, W, X, FF, Z, AA, DD, EE, HH, II, JJ
SYUZHET SEQUENCE:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH, II, JJ
At this point, I was about nine months into my daily ongoing conversation with Rick Harsch, who had introduced me to Brossard but a few months before when he asked me to introduce his paperback edition of Wake Up. Like I said, I read this book in one inebriated sitting, not counting the trips from my shed to the kitchen and back, and when I put it down, I likely sent a rough snapshot of my blurry, sweating mason jar next to the book with something along the lines of “not true what they say, Brossard can write a plot, and better than the rest, as well as the Bard himself.” I gushed about the book until it was time to move on with my day, thinking little of it but of my next drink, which would taste sweeter thanks to the afterglow of reading a novel, but within the hour, Rick had written the Estate:
The person working on the introduction to Wolf has told me that we should publish Did Christ Make Love. Can I have your permission?
Soon after, Rick wrote Steven Moore (who had been providing guest editorial directions on behalf of his friend Chandler for us since we reprinted Raging Joys, Sublime Violations) about our edition of this book and he said:
“That’s great news about Did Christ Make Love?, though I hope you will use Bross-ard's original and preferred title, The Wolf Leaps.”
He also passed along a copy of a Foreword he wrote “for an edition that was supposed to come out 20 years ago but didn't,” which has remained unpublished until now, in which he refers to The Wolf Leaps as “the least known of Brossard’s novels, the scarcest on the used-book market, and the only one not to have been reprinted as a paperback in his lifetime.”
Why is that the case? Beyond the fact that all of Brossard’s work was and has remained neglected? Does it have to do with “the only crime worse than marrying your mother and murdering your father?” Or because it’s a novel in which white merry wives of priests invite sapphic black parishioners up to their apartment under the guise of a half-baked pretense, and, as they are tempting them into hardly verbally consensual sex-massages, have the caucacity to say something like
“And just think how nice it must be, Cynthia, how almost unnaturally blissful, not to be wakened in the middle of the night by the screams of people being mugged or raped or beaten to death in a race riot, Mm, heaven.”
What is the crime worse than Oedipus’s? Why, the star-crossed trysting of a white priest and a black hustler.
And yes, star-crossed, again, as I drunken-ly tried to convey to Rick with my choice of the word Bard, for it is the dramatism of this novel that makes it a novel novel. In his note “To the Reader” in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom writes:
In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.
What is the crux in this crucifix of a novel but the moment that Rojas later recalls as Harrison giving “the distinct impression he was carrying on a most impassioned and urgent interior dialogue with his two warring selves.”
When on the pulpit, our white Jesus has his epiphany amidst some of the most sublime writing in the entire novel:
“I wonder how many of us really know what it means to believe, what the vast implications are of believing. I suspect that many of us either have the wrong understanding of this, or at least are not as actually involved in it as we should be. For example, what does it mean when we say that we believe in another person? Does this mean merely that we know this person won’t lie to us, or try to steal our money? That we are sure this person will be nice to us? If that is all we mean, then we might as well give up. Because belief in another human being means infinitely more than that. It means that we accept his infinite capacities for becoming an extraordinary person, for rising above the limitations we see before us. Belief, real belief, between two people is a kind of magic. With this God-given magic there is nothing they cannot do, nothing they cannot feel, nothing they cannot create. A human paradise comes into existence, a realm of feeling and liberty, without which we are nothing but self-deluded sleepwalkers.”
What more fertile consciousness moment for Shakespearean self-overhearing than the sermonizer on the mount? The beauty of this book is self-evident.
My initial enthusiasm for the jouissance of The Wolf Leaps came from the place in my heart that cherishes William T. Vollmann’s O’Farrell Street hagiographies. And from a narratological standpoint, Did Christ Make Love? (for as such did I know it) had it all: striking monologue-based, flashback-driven non-linearity condensed into a zip-bang tragicomic structure, fluid peripeteia and a delayed anagnorisis, the libertine duplicity of a cast of characters each thinking of other lovers than the ones they are obligated to love, with several dying from their taboo affections while we see directly inside each of their idiosyncratic thoughtspeech peregrinations according to the narrator’s whim, and ultimately, by it all, the soft, full frontal love that is so uncommon in the 21st century, of which wrote Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius, whose timeless eroticism Brossard as Bard seemed to adopt under the guise of modernism, i.e. the quoted monologue. As with The Double View, The Wolf Leaps represented a wild diversion from early Brossard that paved the way for later Brossard while they both remained distinct from the rest for their mature flirtation with free indirect style and clever plotting. As Dorrit Cohn writes in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness:
A monologuist in a third-person context is not the uniquely dominant voice in the text we read. He is always more or less subordinated to the narrator, and our evaluation of what he says to himself remains tied to the perspective (neutral or opiniated, friendly or hostile, empathic or ironic) into which the narrator places him for us.
I doubt more need be said to bait some wayfaring scholar out there to unpack this thing for us once and for all, but until such time please take a long look at the following two ephemera I have created (with obvious limitations in the approximations of the latter as such considerations as characters’ ages and therefore the sequence of their individual adolescent escapades are unknowable to me; I have done the best I can with what I have in order to make this unique novel’s idiosyncratic complexity evident at a glance):
Dramatis Personae
Harrison—episcopal priest
Monique—hustler
Dancer—her pimp
Rojas—concerned parishioner
Elaine—Rojas’s betrothed
Leslie—wife of Harrison
Cynthia—lover of wife of Harrison
Alba—waitress-turned-hustler (thanks to Dancer)
Alba’s Boyfriend
FABULA SEQUENCE:
GG, V, Y, R, H, E, A, B, C, D, F, G, I, J, L, Q, CC, M, N, O, U, P, BB, S, T, W, X, FF, Z, AA, DD, EE, HH, II, JJ
SYUZHET SEQUENCE:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH, II, JJ
April 19, 2022
This was a supremely original and engaging story of forbidden love and complicated relationships. Immensely readable, I look forward to reading more from him, most notably the massive ‘Wake up, We’re almost there’...
Another gem from CoronaSamizdat!!
Another gem from CoronaSamizdat!!
May 30, 2024
This was my introduction to the works of Chandler Brossard. I ordered a copy of Brossard’s As The Wolf Howls from Corona/Samizdat last month and Rick was nice enough to include a few of Brossard’s shorter works in my order, including The Wolf Leaps.
I decided to start with The Wolf Leaps for no particular reason over the other Brossard’s that have recently entered my collection but I did find it to be a good starting point. This short novella shifts perspectives between a handful of characters in mid 20th century Harlem. Exploring the dark and devious elements of city life, Brossard creates an exciting and highly engaging story.
By examining the taboo themes of the day, Brossard pushes the boundaries of contemporary sensibilities. First written in the early 1960s, it wasn’t until a decade later that it was actually published, where it soon went out of print. This is largely seen as one of Brossard’s more obscure works, an interesting starting point for me in his bibliography.
Brossard’s writing is not lavish but remains deeply engaging. He draws you into the start of a chapter immediately, sometimes you don’t even need the first full sentence to picture the scene. I’ve never experienced another author accomplish something like this as well as he does. His scenes of dark bars, grimy bedrooms, and stifling churches really come to life with very little embellishment on his part. The events that happen around these scenes also bring readers in with shock and awe.
If I had any complaint it's that I found the overall narrative to be less engaging than individual chapters. I found each chapter to be really great in providing a contained vignette of a specific character or set of characters but felt that much of the story didn’t cross over between chapters for me.
This is mainly due to the constant shift between characters but I also felt more like I was following this gritty depiction of mid 20th century Harlem than I was any of these characters, even if the characters were offered their own depth and intrigue as well. The narrative starts to tie more together towards the end but I still felt like I was invested more in this world than I was the story.
Overall, I did really like this short taste of what Brossard has to offer. The Wolf Leaps feels like the substance of a great Lou Reed song or the blueprint for a Tarantino script. It is very reminiscent of the works of William S Burroughs but instead of being in the midst of the wild and surreal action, you are observing from a few feet back, maybe watching from the corner of the room.
I highly recommend checking this out. The Corona/Samizdat edition (which is most likely what you will end up reading if you check this out). Is a photocopy of an earlier edition where you may notice some scanning artifacts and annotations from a previous reader. Some may find this a hindrance to the reading experience but for me it really added to the feeling that you are reading the last known copy of a forgotten classic.
I decided to start with The Wolf Leaps for no particular reason over the other Brossard’s that have recently entered my collection but I did find it to be a good starting point. This short novella shifts perspectives between a handful of characters in mid 20th century Harlem. Exploring the dark and devious elements of city life, Brossard creates an exciting and highly engaging story.
By examining the taboo themes of the day, Brossard pushes the boundaries of contemporary sensibilities. First written in the early 1960s, it wasn’t until a decade later that it was actually published, where it soon went out of print. This is largely seen as one of Brossard’s more obscure works, an interesting starting point for me in his bibliography.
Brossard’s writing is not lavish but remains deeply engaging. He draws you into the start of a chapter immediately, sometimes you don’t even need the first full sentence to picture the scene. I’ve never experienced another author accomplish something like this as well as he does. His scenes of dark bars, grimy bedrooms, and stifling churches really come to life with very little embellishment on his part. The events that happen around these scenes also bring readers in with shock and awe.
If I had any complaint it's that I found the overall narrative to be less engaging than individual chapters. I found each chapter to be really great in providing a contained vignette of a specific character or set of characters but felt that much of the story didn’t cross over between chapters for me.
This is mainly due to the constant shift between characters but I also felt more like I was following this gritty depiction of mid 20th century Harlem than I was any of these characters, even if the characters were offered their own depth and intrigue as well. The narrative starts to tie more together towards the end but I still felt like I was invested more in this world than I was the story.
Overall, I did really like this short taste of what Brossard has to offer. The Wolf Leaps feels like the substance of a great Lou Reed song or the blueprint for a Tarantino script. It is very reminiscent of the works of William S Burroughs but instead of being in the midst of the wild and surreal action, you are observing from a few feet back, maybe watching from the corner of the room.
I highly recommend checking this out. The Corona/Samizdat edition (which is most likely what you will end up reading if you check this out). Is a photocopy of an earlier edition where you may notice some scanning artifacts and annotations from a previous reader. Some may find this a hindrance to the reading experience but for me it really added to the feeling that you are reading the last known copy of a forgotten classic.
September 9, 2023
A wonderfully unique and enthralling story of the complexities of love and the search for liberation. A great introduction to Brossard’s work for those that haven’t read him yet.
February 20, 2021
Goddamn whoever failed to upload a cover photo for this gorgeous novel:
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My favorite Brossard. It is a shame that no one else owns this book, and mine’s not for sale. Published two years after Wake Up. An attempt to show that it isn’t for lack of Modernist capability that Wake Up was a sprawling phantasmagoria? Richly plotted Shakespearean tragicomedy about a white Episcopalian priest in Harlem who falls in love with a black prostitute. His sapphic wife’s clandestine affair with spritely Puerto Rican sex goddess Cynthia is a safe space to “discover and develop the full-blown joys and expertise of girl loving,” and what tragedy that their relationship is tainted by such sociopolitical concerns as how to explain to Mrs Harrison (“this ostensibly clean, unscarred, culture-nourished white girl”) why people take dope, and what “Because they just can’t make it, I guess means.” Captures the omnisexual debauchery of early 70s NYC in such a way that the book can be relished like a dank phatty, Saturnalian decadence and richness of sensuosexual pleasure as integral a part of reading Brossard as doubling back is of reading Infinite Jest.
My favorite Brossard. It is a shame that no one else owns this book, and mine’s not for sale. Published two years after Wake Up. An attempt to show that it isn’t for lack of Modernist capability that Wake Up was a sprawling phantasmagoria? Richly plotted Shakespearean tragicomedy about a white Episcopalian priest in Harlem who falls in love with a black prostitute. His sapphic wife’s clandestine affair with spritely Puerto Rican sex goddess Cynthia is a safe space to “discover and develop the full-blown joys and expertise of girl loving,” and what tragedy that their relationship is tainted by such sociopolitical concerns as how to explain to Mrs Harrison (“this ostensibly clean, unscarred, culture-nourished white girl”) why people take dope, and what “Because they just can’t make it, I guess means.” Captures the omnisexual debauchery of early 70s NYC in such a way that the book can be relished like a dank phatty, Saturnalian decadence and richness of sensuosexual pleasure as integral a part of reading Brossard as doubling back is of reading Infinite Jest.
February 26, 2023
Brossard, Chandler - The Wolf Leaps
His pale face looks out of place in the Harlem bar. A tourist, slumming? Or a prospect? One of the hookers sizes him up, approaches. After a few comments, he follows her to a grimy room. Money is exchanged and the bed soon squeals. And at that point, the priest develops a taste for dark meat.
Back at the parish house, the wife of our Episcopalian priest contemplates her miserable existence. Awful neighborhood, disgusting residents, not to mention her husband, a male with “needs”. How happy she had been in the days of her all-girls school, with soft female companions. Sappho beckons.
Then there is the pimp, sweet talking charm to the friendly waitress. She’s wasting her life on her feet all day when she could earn so much more on her knees or on her back. He’d pocket half, and promise her it’s for them, their future. Just have to coax her away from her family, her boyfriend. Easy.
Chandler’s style is lean, not a sentence wasted. Not surprisingly, after this novel of adultery, lesbianism and prostitution was written in 1962, publishers shunned it. When it was finally published in 1973, few in white bread America bought it.
Headlong rush down grubby Harlem backstreets.
Latest edition by Corona\Samizdat is probably your best bet.
His pale face looks out of place in the Harlem bar. A tourist, slumming? Or a prospect? One of the hookers sizes him up, approaches. After a few comments, he follows her to a grimy room. Money is exchanged and the bed soon squeals. And at that point, the priest develops a taste for dark meat.
Back at the parish house, the wife of our Episcopalian priest contemplates her miserable existence. Awful neighborhood, disgusting residents, not to mention her husband, a male with “needs”. How happy she had been in the days of her all-girls school, with soft female companions. Sappho beckons.
Then there is the pimp, sweet talking charm to the friendly waitress. She’s wasting her life on her feet all day when she could earn so much more on her knees or on her back. He’d pocket half, and promise her it’s for them, their future. Just have to coax her away from her family, her boyfriend. Easy.
Chandler’s style is lean, not a sentence wasted. Not surprisingly, after this novel of adultery, lesbianism and prostitution was written in 1962, publishers shunned it. When it was finally published in 1973, few in white bread America bought it.
Headlong rush down grubby Harlem backstreets.
Latest edition by Corona\Samizdat is probably your best bet.
February 27, 2023
Not as full-ranging as other Brossard works tend to be but still a jam-packed neo-noir which showcases Brossard in a curious modernist form.
His most digestible/legible, and while at times awkward, like all his novels, he's still clearly one of the most interesting writers to come out of New York from the 60's/70's.
A+ title.
His most digestible/legible, and while at times awkward, like all his novels, he's still clearly one of the most interesting writers to come out of New York from the 60's/70's.
A+ title.
August 4, 2022
Shoutout gemini nation
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews