Welcome to Litsy!

I read this as part of my decades long quest to read all the books from the RH Best 100 of the 20th century https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100 .

As always with this kind of project, there‘re hits and misses and this was a miss. Certainly fantastic descriptive writing, but little plot and quirk without any heart. I did not find it funny. Cheever was really a short story writer and a few of the chapters could have stood alone as such.

It was a look that he had recoiled from here & there—...—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow & the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn & run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws & customs of the world but from its force & vitality. #law #quotsynov19 @TK-421