Inklings

New York. 1978. Random House. 1st Printing. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0394493494. 191 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Overlook Communications. keywords: American Literature. DESCRIPTION - A novel of suspense, a comic entertainment, a plunge into the literary underworld, inklings is, as one of its advance readers has noted, an adventure story of the mind.' Its protagonist is Jupe, a once-esteemed literary critic with a ruinous sense of the absurd, a teacher yielding increasingly to malice, a loving husband and father, a tetchy man of middle years who has made of candor a deadly vice. Once his critical voice, directed at a flawed piece of prose, was tart, astringent and exact. But now his rue has overflowed, and his acid judgments disfigure not only the drivel and honorable work he's sent to review, but lifelong friendships as well, Moreover, he seems to be losing his sight, and realizes that he is tearing apart his Marriage to his beautiful and plain-spoken wife. What's really needling Jupe, however, is the fact that he can no longer repress an impulse in himself that he truly despises: he yearns to write his first novel, even though the critic in him knows that his book would be at least as false, overreaching and silly as those fictions he relentlessly savages. The early chapters of inklings depict a wonderfully daffy symposium of bogus intellectuals, a reception for an international congress of pen people where squalid motives and mistranslated words are everywhere on the loose, and a watering hole for scribblers and would-be celebrities where there is, in the spirit of such places, a fight. When the scene shifts to the menacing solitude of Jupe's house on the Maine coast, the atmosphere darkens and deepens, and the novel's shattering climax suggests that words can mortally wound, but cannot mend. inventory #27783 Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket.…