Books by Hortense Calisher

The 14th novel from a veteran writers' writer, now in her 86th year, who has for almost a half-century been lavishly praised for her verbal ingenuity and peevishly damned for her baroque fiction's frequent obscurity. The eponymous protagonist (and partial narrator) here is a 40ish nomad, on her own in New York City 20 years after being imprisoned for her complicity in a lethal bombing incident engineered by student revolutionaries. She has spent the ensuing years in and out of drug therapy and psychiatric hospitals. Almost immediately, Calisher ups the rhetorical ante, mingling first-person and omniscient narration and juxtaposing Carol's conversations with the exhausted "SW" (social worker) who visits her cold-water flat against verbal sparring with her street-person comrade Alphonse, an indigent actor. Her escape to a condemned storefront populated by homeless dropouts suits Carol's need to belong somewhere. Beyond this (early) point, little happens. Memories of her student days and of her childhood in Dedham, Massachusetts (raised by two aunts - one of whom, she guesses, was her mother), jostle against her infatuation, friendship, and disillusionment with a handsome South African actor who has his own demons to confront, off in a far different world. This inconclusive, almost inchoate novel lacks both development and tension, but is worth reading nonetheless for its knowledgeability (Calisher brilliantly describes the staging of a pompous piece of theatrical agitprop), really rather remarkable empathy with the city's festering downside, and the assured cadences of its precise, witty prose ("The virtue of the street is that you do not expect") One expects more from Calisher, but is grateful for even this otherwise flawed display of her unique, often haunting mastery of language. (Kirkus Reviews)

Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.