Malcolm, by James Purdy

A fatherless teenage youth takes up with a crowd of eccentrics and weirdos. 

It's always interesting to go back and re-read an old favourite. But sometimes things can go pear shaped, and you wonder at your younger self. What was I thinking? I took to the novels of James Purdy like the proverbial duck to water in my early twenties. I loved their campy, highly wrought style. Malcolm was probably the second or third Purdy novel I read. I recall enjoying it at the time, but thinking that it was perhaps a bit light, or James Purdy light, if I could put it like that. Malcolm was Purdy's first novel proper (he had previously self-published a novella called 63 Dream Palace) and you get the impression he wanted to get the book just right. 

The story starts off with Malcolm sitting on a bench outside a hotel where he is staying. His father is either lost or dead, and there's no mention of a mother. He meets the astrologer Mr Cox who gives him a series of letters of introduction. Malcolm visits a wildly eccentric cast of characters - artists and performers, for the most part - including the imperious Madame Girard. The novel is episodic, each chapter seemingly tacked onto the next, without the characters really having any relation to each other. 

To cut a long story short, the characters are two dimensional (sure, Madame Girard has a few good lines and steals some scenes) and notions of plot seem willfully disregarded. The novel is more an excuse for Purdy to tickle his fancy with a parade of characters he finds funny - and yet when you boil it down, they all speak in a similar, arch tone of dialogue. In this novel at least, Purdy can only really write the one character, a kind of haughty Lady Bracknell, but giving them all different hats and asking us to believe in them as individuals.

Having said that, I did enjoy Malcolm. It easily held my attention the whole way through and the ending was a bizarrely fitting one. Malcolm was first published in 1959, and comes with a rave blurb from Dorothy Parker. One can imagine it was utterly risque in its day, but today it reads as strange and disconnected from reality. Some of the references may have seemed ironic to an outre literary crowd in the 1950s, but seem of questionable taste now. 

I shall read more Purdy again, but I feel he is very much an acquired taste.