The Fiction of Hortense Calisher

"Hortense Calisher is the author of eleven novels, six collections of stories or novellas, and two memoirs. The publication of her first book of short stories, In the Absence of Angels (1951), marked the debut of an important writer. For the past forty years her works have been consistently and widely reviewed. Calisher has long been celebrated (and censured) as a "writer's writer," a consummate stylist with an impressive range of subjects. Despite that range, however, Calisher's works possess a thematic coherence that has eluded critical notice. For more than forty years, she has spun out variations on the motif of rites of passage and of extradition. Her protagonists may yearn for stasis, for a firmly manageable reality, but finally emerge into a world where change is the only constant." "In The Fiction of Hortense Calisher, the first book-length study of Calisher's work, Kathleen Snodgrass demonstrates this theme's dominance. Following an introduction that provides biographical and critical background, she explores similarities in the structure of Calisher's works, grouping them together to illuminate both the general motif and its distinctive variations. In the first chapter, "Bridging the Gulf: The Autobiographical Stories," Snodgrass arranges Calisher's early stories into a biographically chronological order; a coherent narrative emerges that dramatizes Hester Elkin's rites of passage from childhood through adolescence to early adulthood. Hester Elkin is only the first of a succession of Calisher's protagonists to embrace life as an open-ended journey. In chapter 2, Snodgrass examines four Calisher novels that have in common tumultuous transitions from adolescence to adulthood. In Calisher, an essential part of that rite of passage is a "coming down from the heights" of theorizing and fantasy, into a willingness to grapple with mundane, adult realities. Chapter 3, "False Entries," focuses on two companion novels in which the central drama is the painful transition from stasis to movement." "Subsequent chapters focus on two very different types of movement: "Solo Flights" deals with characters sloughing off conventional lives like dead skins and setting off alone, while "Re-Entries" examines the opposite movement - here Calisher's characters re-enter what she has termed the "great enclosure of the norm." Later chapters discuss Calisher's two novels of space travel - works in which the primary voyage is psychic rather than physical - and works dealing with the voyaging life well into old age." "In her conclusion, "Calisher's 'Monologuing Eye,'" Snodgrass demonstrates the inseparability of style and theme in Calisher's works. Both stylistically and thematically, Calisher repudiates a predictably linear progression through life. If her style is, as some critics have remarked, "dense" and "elliptical," so, too, is her experience of the world. She leaves it to others to duplicate a received reality, choosing instead to take soundings on a world in flux."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved