Eustace Chisholm and the Works

Eustace Chisholm and the Works, a 1967 novel that became a gay classic, is an especially outspoken book among the author's controversial body of work. Purdy recalls that Eustace Chisholm and the Works, named one of the Publishing Triangle's 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels of the 20th Century, outraged the New York literary establishment. Set in a rooming-house in depression-era Chicago the novel brings a marvellous game of emotional chairs. Eustace's wife moves back in while he takes up with a man. It was my introduction to the work of James Purdy and I found it more liberating, in the imaginative sense, than outrageous. Perhaps because I has read so much science fiction in my teens I was ready for a book whose story is more magical than mundane. It introduced me to a contemporary world beyond my own and a style of writing that would lead me to read many more of Purdy's novels over the ensuing years. They are the sort of books you remember fondly for their intensity and imagination and they are the ones that you consider rereading to recapture some of the verve that made you feel alive as you read them. More than breaking out of the pre-Stonewall closet, however, this novel liberated its author and readers can be grateful for that. ( )

this is the story of an older man's fascination with a younger man under condititions where the desire is unlikely to be fulfilled. The work is reminiscent of Mann's, Death in Venice. I read this as a boy, right after its initial publication, and found it terribly depressing at the time. I suspect I would bring a new perspective with the passage of 35 years. ( )