[The] world of James Purdy's novels is the Post-existential one of Heller's and of Barth's: the world has no meaning which can be rationally discovered; human beings have no innate identity; human action is futile. It is true, too, that although Purdy's techniques appear at first to be closer to realism than Heller's and Barth's, in the sense that fewer obviously impossible events take place and that his settings are familiar places—Brooklyn, Chicago, towns i...

In the three decades since the end of World War II—a period when American affluence and technological impersonality grew to astronomical heights and appeared to many Americans to be the be-all and end-all of human existence—Purdy dared to tell them the truth: behind the facade of great material wealth lay a vast spiritual wasteland of loveless lives and hellish marriages; from such barren marriages came children who, as a rule, were treated cruelly by their parents or by other adults; rape and...

[Purdy's] originality and extraordinary talents cannot be neatly inventoried and … to portray him as the author of an eccentric body of fiction, as a part of some movement or fashionable literary trend, or as a novelist who essentially mocks the capacities of art, is to deny the complexities of his individual voice. His own description of his work as an exploration of the American soul conveyed in a style based on the rhythms and accents of American speech runs contrary to such categories and ...

A problem novel in which the problem is never solved, Purdy's latest book [The Nephew] is in many ways a departure from the fey and fantastic humor for which he has become celebrated. If he mystified people and won many fans by Malcolm, he may gain some dissenters with this relatively simple novel of compassion and small-town humors. The nephew, unlike Malcolm, has few adventures, and the only one he has which is of dramatic consequence remains shrouded in Purdy's dialectical ambivalence. In a...

[In] Children Is All, Purdy displays once more the talents, quirks and compulsions that have, in the few short years be has been publishing, moved his readers to almost equal extravagance of praise and exasperation. What is best in this volume is unmistakably Purdy. Perhaps the same is true of what is worst in it, but that is at least a less obvious conclusion. "Daddy Wolf," for instance, the first story in the collection, is a totally successful tour de force—a semihysterical monologue...

There is a double edge to the quite remarkable talent of James Purdy. The simplest view of this may be taken by looking at the two novels he has so far published…. Yet the simple view of Purdy is not easily maintained, for he is more likely to blend what I think we may call the realistic and the surrealistic visions. He is rather complex and special. This was evident in the arresting short stories, eventually collected as Color of Darkness, which brought him such high praise several years ago; we hav...

For Purdy, Christ's message was the last great event—the critical idea—in the history of human consciousness: "love one another as I have loved you." But Purdy is also a Calvinist (by way of Presbyterianism); he's a firm believer in man's fallen state…. When you put Christ and Calvin together, you wind up with the conflict at the heart of Purdy's vision: Christ held out the hope for love; lapsarian man continually assures love's defeat; h...

Mourners Below, which appeared this past summer, is Purdy's tenth full-length novel, and the book appears likely to share the same fate as its immediate predecessors. If critics can be likened to rock climbers, then Mourners Below is a sheer scree slope, offering countless apparent critical footholds, but none which is strong enough to bear the weight of complete interpretation. The book seems to call out for all manner of critical approaches—psychoanalytic, archetypal, even phenomenological&#...

James Purdy began to make his reputation with some stories first successfully published in England, where the praise for him had that overripe odor that characterizes a peculiar subdepartment of British enthusiasm for minor American writers…. But the stories themselves, when they finally appeared in this country in the collection Color of Darkness, emanated a hard harsh radiance…. Purdy, like Kafka, tells dreams which turn out to be stories and at the same time retain their fretful, oppressive...

In the last five years James Purdy has published two novels, "Malcolm" and "The Nephew," and a collection of stories, "Color of Darkness." These very nearly established him as one of the most important American writers to appear since the war. The judgment, which in the mind of crusty critics was rendered suspect by a certain voguishness that attended his sudden appearance on the scene, is now confirmed by the present collection ["Children Is All"]. Li...

The structure of a typical Purdy short story has … [an epiphanic effect]: a selected moment or series of moments that body forth a spiritual or psychological state of exalted confrontation between one person who is in extremis, and an auditor who is deeply but always powerlessly perceptive…. Of Purdy's twenty-two collected short stories in Color of Darkness and Children Is All, fourteen (roughly two-thirds) are … "duologues," conversational confrontations between tw...

In Mourners Below, Purdy's latest demonstration that "terrible events are the order of the universe," a dead brother dictates the destiny of his grieving family. The novel focuses on Duane Bledsoe, 17, whose two older half-brothers, Douglas and Justin, have been killed in war. Duane's parents are divorced, and in his father, Eugene, with whom he lives, Duane encounters only "deep wells of silence" and a refusal to mourn their common loss. Alone in his grief, Duane w...

Although its subject is physical passion, "Narrow Rooms" is strangely bodiless. There's almost no characterization, which makes it hard to remember who's supposed to be dominating and murdering whom—I tried to keep a running score, but I still don't get that bit about Gareth and Brian and the train. Clearly, James Purdy thinks his story is fraught with significance, but the four boys are so interchangeable that I found myself wondering as I read what all the fuss wa...

"In a Shallow Grave" is a modern Book of Revelation, filled with prophesies, visions and demoniac landscapes. The moon appears to Garnet [the narrator] "by daylight, horned and angry and discolored." The novel itself is "horned" like Garnet's daytime moon. It holds us because we are stuck in the powerful, swaying rhythms of Garnet's voice. This comes as a surprise, because Purdy's most recent novels, "The House of the Solitary Maggot�...

The story [of Mourners Below] is deceptively simple. It's a kind of battlefield where the living play dead, and the dead begin to warp those "mourners below." Most of the novel exists in that lost hour "between very late and very early." This has always been the strength of Mr. Purdy's writing. He cuts below the skin and doesn't become involved with the sociology of any particular time or place. He uses locale to isolate hysteria and deal with that terrible a...

[Narrow Rooms] is a tightly woven short novel set in a rural Southern landscape…. Although there are some explicit love scenes between two men, Purdy's interest in homosexuality does not seem to be pornographic. Sidney, Brian, Gareth, and Roy are all misfits. In a sense, they are lost souls who have become victims of their own illusions. The strong drama of the four men is maintained by their obedience to an unspoken and unwritten code, making it seem as if they are acting out a predetermined ...