As I was thinking over books that I really would like to get to in the next year or two, so as to enjoy them before I am completely over the hill, someone left a copy of Raymond Kennedy's Ride a Cockhorse (the NYRB edition) in the Little Free Library in the front yard. While I actually own a different edition, I did pull this out and read the intro. However, this copy clearly belonged to a smoker, so I put it back after I was done. The novel seems like quite a romp, with as much manic energy as A Confederacy of Dunces. So I will add it to my short-term list and see if I can get to it by the summer.
There's no question that Ride a Cockhorse is Kennedy's masterpiece, though he actually wrote 8 novels, most set near Holyoke, Mass., though The Bitterest Age is a WWII novel set in Germany!
I vaguely remembered that another one of his novels had almost "broke through," so I did a bit of digging and found that Lulu Incognito was a Vintage Contemporary title.
Oddly enough, this isn't at Robarts, though a few of his other novels are in the stacks, including Good Night, Jupiter, as well as Columbine, which apparently features a hapless WWII vet who gets entangled with a precocious 13 year old (Leaping Shades of Lolita, Batman!). There is a copy of Lulu in the Toronto Public Library, but only a non-circulating reference copy. I've already mentioned how silly I think this for fiction, so no point in repeating myself. Because it was a Vintage book with a pretty cool cover, I went ahead and ordered an out-of-print copy, even though I don't expect it will be as good as Cockhorse. Who knows, maybe it will make it here around my birthday.
No comments:
Post a Comment