The Practical Heart : Four Novellas
- Book Review,
by ALLAN GURGANUS
Amazon.com
Allan Gurganus documents the daily dreams that sustain us. In the title novella of his extraordinary new collection, The Practical Heart, the narrator tells how his Aunt Muriel, a dour, genteel-poor Scottish immigrant, came to be painted by John Singer Sargent. This bit of family history turns out to be a fiction of the narrator's making, invented in an attempt to express how grand his aunt might have been, given an entirely different life. The other novellas likewise give us narrators interpreting and inventing the people around them. In "Preservation News" a woman eulogizes a historical preservationist who taught her the language of architecture; in "He's One, Too," a gay man looks back on his 1950s youth, when a stolid neighbor was arrested for indecent exposure in a public lavatory; in "Saint Monster," a son mourns his homely, good-hearted father, giving us parent-love as perhaps the most ordinary fantasy of all. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
The four novellas in this collection by Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, etc.) divide neatly into stylistic halves. The first two, "The Practical Heart" and "Preservation News," are written with an almost Jamesian attention to the semaphore of implications and elided emotions that mediate social pretenses. "The Practical Heart," which tells how the narrator's great-aunt Muriel Fraser came to be painted by John Singer Sargent, first builds a story, then deconstructs it. The story is foregrounded in the collapse of the Fraser family's Scottish fortune, which maroons the clan in Chicago, where Muriel goes from being a pampered heiress to a piano teacher. But the second chapter in this story takes us behind the scenes of the fiction, showing how Muriel, a stubborn, fragile woman, became her nephew-narrator's first guide to life outside of parochial Falls, N.C. In "Preservation News," Mary Ellen Broadfield, an 81-year-old woman of quality in Falls, writes the obituary of Tad Worth, the moving spirit behind the local preservationist scene. Openly gay, martini-loving, gossipy and unkempt, Worth carved a space for himself in Falls that would have been unimaginable in an earlier era. The next two stories, written in a more freewheeling style, inhabit the dark side of that earlier era. "He's One, Too," tells of the ruin of a local businessman, Dan R., caught feeling up a 15-year-old boy in a rest-room setup in Raleigh. "Saint Monster" is a memoir of Clyde Melvin Delman Sr. by his son. Clyde, an ugly, much cuckolded salesman, spent his life passing as white. Although the first two novellas are beautifully realized, the last two are needier texts, requiring an empathy on the reader's part that they don't quite merit. 14-city author tour. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This collection of four novellas places Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All) in the pantheon of America's best storytellers. Indeed, the title novella, an ode to a great aunt who takes an artistically inclined young boy under her wing and shows him through kindness the meaning of love, won the National Magazine Prize. In it, the narrator imagines the grand romantic adventure she, as the daughter of an impoverished immigrant, never had. Each of the tales explores the impact that one individual can have on another and how courage and beauty can arise from the most unexpected sources. There is the young preservationist dying of AIDS whose joy in saving old homes never falters and whose smile in the face of death continues to bring happiness to his survivors. There is the pillar of the community whose sudden disgrace confirms a young boy's determination to tell the truth, to be out in the world. Lastly, there is "Saint Monster" the amazingly "ugly" man whose love and devotion to his son transcends race, public humiliation, and even death so that in the end, for the narrator, even "the bilge [flung by a fish leaping suddenly from a weedy canal at a moment of enlightenment] tasted like shrimp, like rust, a life: my dry mouth savoring every drop." These stories may all arise from Gurganus's Carolina home soil, but their messages are universal in scope. Highly recommended.- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1988) presents a collection of three long short stories and one short novel, with mixed results. In "The Practical Heart," the narrator recalls the proclivities of his great-aunt, daughter of a Scottish immigrant to Chicago. The reader is teased into perhaps believing she had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, but the whole story comes across as arch and gimmicky. "Preservation News" is a fey portrait of a man who has just lost his battle with AIDS but who spent his last breath in the pursuit of the preservation of historic properties; however, the storytelling voice is too cloying. But "He's One, Too" offers an ironically sympathetic portrayal of a married man arrested for lewd acts with a younger man. And in the longest and most moving piece, "Saint Monster," a son remembers how the relationship between his ugly but kind father and his beautiful but faithless mother forced him into prematurely dealing with the rawer aspects of adulthood. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
?Gurganus is an old-fashioned yarn spinner. . . . [The Practical Heart] reanimates all those familiar truths about art?s power to transform and redeem.? ?The New York Times
?As intriguing as it is deadly funny. . . . An entertaining, disturbing, and inspiring book . . . [from] one of our greatest living raconteurs.? ?The Atlantic Monthly
?Gurganus?s commitment to the importance of suffering and the power of art to redeem it, so like Henry James?, blows through [these stories] like a cold wind of truth.? ?Newsday
?There is no other American writer working from his recipe, and nobody dishing it out with such full-throated gusto.? ?The Washington Post
Book Description
A luminous quartet, five years in the writing, reveals even more fully the breathtaking range of "a storyteller in the grand tradition" (New York Times).
Allan Gurganus's voice--by turn bawdy and serene, folkloric and profane--deepens as it soars into this quiet masterwork. Four new fables--rich in event, comedy, experience--surge with the force of history's headlines versus sidestreet human fortitude. Improbable heroes and heroines spiral outward from Gurganus's familiar Carolina terrain. Each fires into a wild and differing direction, all in quest of some fantasy that's practically impossible:
--An impoverished immigrant has her portrait painted (or not) by John Singer Sargent.
--A young man's devotion to saving eighteenth-century homes—and their odd lingering ghosts—helps him find unlikely ways to renovate his own mortality.
--A pillar of the community becomes, over the course of one cartoon matinee, its pariah.
--A beloved, transfixingly homely father shows his village and his only son a decency stronger than race,
humiliation, or even death itself.
These characters' quixotic missions prove mysterious, often even to themselves. Their legacies are not easily deciphered. And yet, their most impractical wishes soon become the heartiest facts about each. They manage to wrest battle-courage from everyday indecision. Out of superstition and convention, they lift certainty. They each find a wealth of consoling truths banked--immortal--in the all-too-human heart.
Allan Gurganus's great powers--announced more than a decade ago by Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--here achieve a yearning exuberance worthy of a new Whitman. These leaps of sexual longing, empathy, and faith become a major new gift from this essential fablemaker.
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