THE BOYS OF WINTER - Hardcover

Sheed, Wilfrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039455874X ISBN 13: 9780394558745

Publisher: Knopf, 1987

Synopsis

Jonathan Oglethorpe, an editor, and Waldo Spinks, an aging novelist, race to write the perfect comic novel about art, life, and sex in the Hamptons, as they try to organize the local writers' softball team

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The assorted writers and editors who live year-round in the Hamptons, looked at askance by the true locals and scornful in turn of the summer people, are a perfect target for satire, and Sheed's new novel gleefully riddles them. There is publisher Jonathan Oglethorpe, deeply cynical about writers yet nursing a secret novel; his nemesis, the macho Waldo Spinks, whose prose is universally condemned but whose books are avidly read; Billy Van Dyne, an exquisite writer whose problem is exactly the opposite and who has a much-lusted-after wife; Ferris Fender, who writes Civil War novels, but whose gay Southern gentility just may be a pose; and gruff Cecily Woodruff, whose theme is heartbreak among Park Avenue matrons. Locked into the winter blues, this unlikely group is dragooned into a summer softball team that eventually gets to play a visiting Hollywood group, with disastrous results. Much of what Sheed has to say about the vanitys and deviousnessof writers and publishers is laugh-out-loud funny (" 'Sales conference,' I say, using the basic publishing excuse. Nobody knows when we actually hold the buggers, so you can use the alibi all yearour version of the splitting headache.") The laughs turn a little sour toward the end, in an oddly grating denouement, but until then the book is a constant fizz of delight. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jonathan Oglethorpe, a burnt-out editor at a distinguished New York publishing firm, lives year-round in the Hamptons, where he spends his evenings at Jimmy's Bar discussing sports and "summer people" with other New York expatriates. Oglethorpe is secretly incorporating these people into an elaborate roman a clefthat is, until he discovers that another Jimmy's regular is doing exactly the same thing. Each is a character in the other's book. This sounds like an ideal fictional premise for Sheed, who established standards for the "publishing" novel in such comic masterpieces as Max Jamison and Office Politics, but this work fails to measure up. Oglethorpe's dreary narrative voice defeats the famous Sheed wit. Fans will be disappointed. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 039455874X
• ISBN 13: 9780394558745
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280