Companion Pieces: Two Novellas: Doing and Undoing and Game of Sprit. - Hardcover

Strong, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0944072283 ISBN 13: 9780944072288

Publisher: Zoland Books, 1993

Synopsis

Two novellas--"Doing and Undoing" and "Game of Spirit"--reveal the stories of two brothers returning to the Illinois farmlands where they spent their Eisenhower-era childhoods, and a lonesome young man whose life starts to mirror that of his neighbor

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Two novellas from Strong (Secret Words, 1992, etc.)--one about family secrets, the other about a man who lives alone across an alleyway from another man with a similar name: gentle, warmhearted fictions, the former is a bit cluttered and repetitious, while the latter plays to Strong's best suit--his ability to evoke the pleasures of loneliness. In ``Doing and Undoing,'' two brothers, Daniel and Sim Poore, take a five-day trip back to their childhood home--their grandmother's large house in Illinois farmland that has since become a monastery. Strong pairs off chapters--Sim's dreams, Dan's dreams, Sim's thoughts, Dan's thoughts, conversations between various family members--to tell his story. It can be magical at times, especially when sometimes-painful memories are juxtaposed with Dan's childhood made-up country of Tannu Tuva; but it can also be self-indulgent, particularly when Strong lapses into a modified stream-of-consciousness that tends to clutter up rather than clarify the family saga. While we're brought discursively and intimately into the family circle, the narrative finally gets tedious, especially since it inevitably curls back upon itself to try to dramatize the necessity of traveling back and forth in time. ``Game of Spirit,'' however, takes us all the way back to Strong's early style in Tike and Five Stories (1969): it's about Lou, who lives across the alley from Lew, and who meets an engaging assortment of neighbors since he lives alone (``It is warm now up to his belly button. Black floorboards, dark green rug, the book piles...''), checking out ten books a day, all the people once in his life ``long gone from here'' until, finally, ``He forgets if he is Lou or Lew.'' A charming, moving update on spacey 60's types, then, is delivered with an incisive work-a-day style, whereas ``Doing and Undoing'' is both more ambitious and less successful. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Dan and Simeon Poore, troubled brothers in "Doing and Undoing," the first of two fine novellas featured here, return to the bizzare home where they grew up, an Illinois farm house transmogrified into a gothic castle complete with turrets and gargoyles. As the two recall their Eisenhower-era childhoods and dark fantasy games, secrets emerge. Simeon discloses his early homosexual trysts, while Dan opens up about his failed common-law marriage and his fantasies about an imaginary alter-ego, a composer raised by whores in Alaska. The brothers also visit their eccentric great-uncle who painted the castle's walls with Norse gods and gnomes symbolizing family members. Using dreams, stream-of-consciousness and conversations, Strong ( Secret Words ) probes the mindset of a duo dangerously trapped in the past. In "Game of Spirit," Lou, a loner in a nameless sun-drenched town, borrows an ID card from Lew, his neighbor, a shifty, hedonistic draft-dodger who goes by many aliases. Lou, with a fragile sense of self, starts to merge his identity with Lew. Lou/Lew fizzles in a vacuum of the present, just as Dan/Sim founders in the past.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Zoland Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0944072283
• ISBN 13: 9780944072288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220