Hartspring Exposed

ISBN-13: 9781496088253 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 176 str.

Ernest Hugh Lockridge

Opis

THE SCANDALOUS 1968 NOVEL (New American Library, Signet Books) RESTORED and REVISED HARTSPRING EXPOSED exposes the "first thirty-four odd years" in the life of its narrator, the perverse and charming Hartspring--father, voyeur, teacher, war hero, lover, salesman of encyclopedias, madcap comedian, Prince of Life-- and Death. The story--set in a fictional Yale University--focuses on Hartspring's culminating disaster, the wild feast from his office window on the plush, nude bodies of two girls in their dormitory across the way. Cynthia Potter and Diana Lou Moon strip themselves naked--Amazon goddesses girding their loins preparatory to a full frontal assault upon the World of Men. In a brilliant panorama of flashback, the chief figures in Hartspring's past emerge: lovely mad Mag Durham from Alabama; Willy Gross, who engineers Hartspring's marriage to the pneumatic Mona; Hartspring's father, who grimly "blows his mind" with a twelve-gauge shotgun; and Hartspring's mother, who, in a despairing last odyssey through Europe, destroys herself with sex and booze. Two major actors of the present drama are Holman, the loyal friend who scrounges Hartspring his final job, and Hartspring's student, the sinister Yolk--editor of The Organ, voice of the coming generation, famous novelist in the senior college year. It's Yolk who, under the guise of gathering material for fiction, employs the dormitory strippers in a plot to precipitate Hartspring's ruin. Chthonic forces are relentlessly astir beneath the genteel ivy facade. There are nascent wars-abroad and at home. Shedding its baby teeth, Women's Liberation has adopted an aggressive "New Morality" with a fearful bite Youthful vitality attacks Authority with Anarchy. Violence bloodies the air we breathe. Even the New Criticism and its Monastery, the Yale Department of English, face disintegration False gods and prophets are taking center stage. Emerging from this lusty Crucible into a Brave New World of falling boundaries and fallen gods, our narrator, Hartspring, strives to map a way, to stake a path. HARTSPRING EXPOSED may outrage or charm, but it is certain to fascinate the reader. "An offbeat, brilliant novel. Nothing quite so outrageous has before come out of an academic community to my knowledge. It's dark and funny, and sometimes, way down sad." Mark Schorer "A tale of academia sexualis in Wonderland, Lockridge's fun-punning story proceeds in a quasi-Kafka fashion. An absurd novel influenced by Sterne, it is as contemporary in spirit as Catch-22. The locality is New Haven; Yale is the university where Hartspring teaches. Not only good reading but intelligent." The New Haven Register "There isn't a dull page in the whole book." Library Journal "In its way this is a sad tale indeed, yet if you were to open the book to any page, you would surely find that fact hard to believe. HARTSPRING is a marvelously funny book, joyously raunchy, infused with the spirit of wild bawdry that we so freely associate with Rabelais, for along with the ribaldry, we are confronted with death, disease, and malignancy. They remind us as the great monk never failed to, of our mortality and of the transitory nature of all flesh--blond, brunet, or redhead." The National Observer "Lockridge writes with gusto and intelligence and has come up with a funny and provocative commentary on an insanely disordered modern life." Publisher's Weekly "The distinctive tone of Lockridge's free-wheeling narrative is a balance of exuberance and despair. The writing's exuberance becomes the measure of Hartspring's own distance from suicide." The Yale Review "HARTSPRING is likely to create the largest identification guessing game around New Haven since Tell the Time to None."G. Royce Smith, Book Department Manager, The Yale Co-op, "The Book Smith,"New Haven Register"