Following the widely celebrated "Collected Poems," this second
volume in the series of James Merrill's works brings us Merrill as
novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose
pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his
novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and
given new form.
Merrill's first novel, "The Seraglio," is a daring "roman a clef"
derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son
of Charles Merrill, one of America's most famous twentieth-century
financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something
to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and
treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an
irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and
ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his
lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum
we find "The (Diblos) Notebook," an experimental novel in which a
young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and
assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill's
plays, including the one-act comedy of manners "The Bait" and the
Chekhovian" The Immortal Husband"--a reinvention of the myth of
Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are
also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel,
reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the
first time in print, here is Merrill's short play "The Birthday," a
fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the
concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would
later blossom into his great epic, " The Changing Light at
Sandover."
"From the Hardcover edition."
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