Can a chilly, misanthropic, half-crippled, middle-aged, twice-divorced, multimillionaire WASP whose hobby is researching the Albigensian heresies find happiness with a radical Jewish journalist who's 20 years younger than he, depressed by his money and resolved "never, never [to] marry a goy?" Yes and no is the answer delivered in ["Unnatural Scenery"]…. Marshall Lewis Henderson, the WASP multimillionaire, and Jackie Gold, the Jewish journalist, commence living toge...

"Living Quarters" is the story of a charmingly psychotic woman in the deranged late 20th century. It's told in language that shimmers. It's a story that emerges from plots that explore human longing, suffering and pleasure among the civilized on three continents as though seeking a statement about a condition beyond articulation…. If I understand "Living Quarters" correctly, it suggests, while offering champagne-and-acid entertainment, that the present enviro...

Film critics who write novels are often suspected of trying to enter the world of filmmaking through the back door. In Vincent Canby's case, let us dispose of the suspicion. His first novel, [Living Quarters,] although it begins with an act of violence, soon turns into a recounting of the life, loves, and schizophrenia of a madcap heiress from the Midwest. (p. 26) Mr. Canby's prose is flat and dry, glinting now and then with satiric, disenchanted humor. The book's method is that of reme...

[Unnatural Scenery] whirrs with rapid, centrifugal force, yet gives little indication of the generative impulse behind all the noise—other than possibly an interest in the geographical lore of the state of Virginia. Marshall Lewis Henderson, the narrator, is one of those larger-than-life figures who is, at best, representative of the world around him and, at worst, an oafish presence. His childhood is depicted from a bewildering variety of angles, featuring elements of gentility and reclusiveness tha...

[There's] much generic ambiguity about Vincent Canby's [Living Quarters]: the crime, victim and culprit are swiftly identified, and the book sets off in a series of ever-retreating flashbacks to root out the social and psychological background to the event. Daisianna turns out to be an archetypal American whore/bitch/goddess, pill-slugging, schizophrenic, religioso, selfish and idle; her friends and family are scarcely less neurotically self-indulgent. Even straight Jimmy Barnes, Daisianna�...