Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - Volume Two

by Marguerite Young

One of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of the twentieth century, Miss Macintosh, My Darling might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. In prose that is poetic, incantatory, and extraordinarily rich, Marguerite Young takes us on a search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare, touching on subjects as varied as drug addiction, women's suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy (both real and imagined), schizophrenia, love, gambling, and perfectionism.
With precise detail, Young defines the characters in this phantasmagorical journey: Miss Macintosh herself, from What Cheer, Iowa, a seemingly forthright and normal woman with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; the opium lady Catherine Cartwheel, a recluse who entertains imaginary guests in a great New England seaside house; the gentle Mr. Spitzer, a lawyer, composer and mystical space traveller who is wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the raffish gambler and sports virtuoso; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, a wildman of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley, a very efficient Christian hangman; and many others.
The masterwork of a genius, Miss Macintosh, My Darling stands by itself as one of the greatest works of our time.

Genres: Novels

580 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Marguerite Vivian Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in the American identity, social issues, and environmentalism.

Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.

Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.

Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.

Reviews

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing, awe-inspiring, insane, metaphysical, brilliant, incomparable, astonishing, profound, challenging, gorgeous, luminous, fanciful, mysterious, enchanting, ingenious, complex, groundbreaking, stimulating, surprising, hypnotic, emotional, endless. . . nonpareil.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I extemporized at some length on Volume One of MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING when I reviewed it a week ago today. I have the distinction of being the first person on Goodreads to comment on the second volume. As I already surmised: due to the heft and what some might call the general difficulty of this bifurcated novel, many appear to not tackle the second volume. That is a shame. In my review of the first volume I characterized it as almost a kind of wildly ambitious prose poem. It wasn't until about two-thirds of the way through the second volume, however, that I realized how unfair and misleading it is to claim as much. I admired Young's sense of form from moment to moment as I made my way through the novel, and indeed had good reason to liken it to poetry, but it was not until the second volume and a bravura set of conceits a good way into it, that I began to have a sense of the overall shape of the work. What had once seemed all but shapeless and fascinatingly digressive, suddenly presented itself in near-sculptural terms. In my review of the first volume I mentioned how the novel begins in media res, suggesting it is going somewhere and operating in a more or less traditional way, only to quickly "lose the thread." Well, guess what? The thread was not lost but merely deferred. For a very, very long time. Reading Volume Two, I also became more attentive to separate registers in the work, and nuances of degree. I feel, once again, that when I previously called the novel a kind of prose poem, I was not doing adequate justice to the passages that are more conventionally novelistic. MISS MACINTOSH is hardly Lautréamont. It does go very far into gorgeous, discombobulating cosmic abstraction, but it routinely brings us back to earth, dealing indelibly with human peccadilloes, psychic scars, and emotional sensitivities. There are characters, after all, not just riffs, and not only are these characters fully realized, they are exhaustively gutted in a way I am not sure I have ever quite seen done before. It is interesting that the transition from Volume One to Volume Two does not occur in a way that makes any structural sense. It simply happens where it happens in order to cut the book fairly evenly in two. It's funny, because the splice happens somewhere in the middle of perhaps the book's most far-out section, going on a very long time indeed, focusing on the dissolution of the doubled Mr. Spitzer into a kind stardust of music and entropy. Again, Young at times does go very far out into the outer reaches. I have already, in my review of the first volume of this staggering 1,198-page masterwork, said a great deal about Young's style, sensibility, and some of the philosophical scaffolding that would seem to support her. I think it might simply make sense at this point to inform prospective readers that though you may think, having read the first volume, that you more or less get what the author is doing--amazing language etc., but I get it--you owe it to yourself to read the second volume, not only because the work can only be properly assimilated in its entirety, but because there are, I promise you, honest-to-goodness revelations in store. This is a massive literary achievement operating at the very highest level of originality, scale, and significance in terms of the tradition of the modernist novel itself. But it is not some dry exercise made for snooty admiration. There are considerable rewards here. For the intrepid and the hardy. It might change your life.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my review of volume one. Seriously, I don’t see why there needed to be a second volume. There’s a couple bits I liked, but most I didn’t care for and the vast majority seemed duplicative of volume one, which was already duplicative of itself. Technically advanced, but a pointless pain to read.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This feels like a book that shouldn’t be finished. Instead, it seems as if it should be always finished + unfinished. But I suppose that’s rather apt. It’s magnificent.