Moe’s Villa & Other Stories

By James Purdy

Reviewed by Nicholas Leither

            You’ve probably never heard of James Purdy. If you have, it’s likely a coincidence or a fluke. Even though the writer has been publishing since the 1940s, hailed by Gore Vidal as “an authentic American genius,” even the most savvy literature buff’s face might crunch into confusion when the author and his books are mentioned. The fact is, America just wasn’t ready for James Purdy, wasn’t primed for his outlandish imagination or his sometimes scandalously perverse prose. If America could barely muster the taste for Angela Carter’s narrative mischief, James Purdy was just too tart for the American palate. But not anymore. The author who has been selling books steadily in the UK for half a century is beginning to creep into the American literary consciousness, following the charge generated by his latest collection of shorts, Moe’s Villa & Other Stories.

            To a readership that really, really likes plain short stories about domestic relationships, Moe’s Villa & Other Stories is not the kind of book you can or should approach with such a limited aesthetic. In fact, it’s hard to categorize anything about Purdy’s aesthetic. Some are marvelous fairy tales, others realistic and human, and the title story is a novella that trembles with uncanny vibrations originating somewhere between its eccentric characters and its playful language. Purdy is not the kind of writer one can sum up in few words. He lurks on the edges of genres, avoids categories and types, prefers pliancy in his plotlines, themes, and even in his characters.

            The opening story, “Kitty Blue,” scintillates with the delightful relationship between Madame Lenore, an opera singer, and her sophisticated, talking cat. Fantasy and whimsy careen into drama and realism as the reader moves into “Reaching Rose,” in which an old man deals with his loneliness by spending every evening in a bar’s phone booth talking to a woman who isn’t there. In the story “Bonnie,” the narrator leaves his aging and widening wife only to return several years later to find the beautiful woman he had fell in love with at eighteen—now totally unattainable. And in “A little Variety, Please,” a young girl falls in love with a dragon she had previously feared, not without a burlesque nod to Beauty and the Beast’s constantly evolving themes of oedipal versus erotic love. “‘Love you? Let me finish,’ the Dragon said. ‘I will adopt you, if not love you.’”

            The reader simply cannot depend on Purdy’s characters. They are anomalies, often equivocal, unreliable, and puzzling. As in “Bonnie,” characters can revert to previous versions of themselves. In “The White Blackbird,” a godmother’s relationship with her godson begins normally, becomes wrought with an unspoken sexuality, and elapses as the two characters seem to change into one, the godmother’s age falling away along with the godson’s youth. Their relationship becomes an antidote to the poisons of staunch individuality—together the black and the white become an amphibious gray.

            Purdy doesn’t miss the opportunity to set up his aesthetic pliancy. At the end of his first tale he writes: “And almost every night, at the Prince’s command, Kitty Blue would entertain them with the story of his adventures, interspersed with his guitar playing and singing and soft-shoe routine. The narrative of his adventures changing a little from night to night, new details coming into the story, new additions not imparted before…”

            These stories aren’t stitched together by a common thread. There is nothing concrete that links them. Yet, they belong together. It is a cryptic mutability that festoons the collection. These stories tickle the imagination, tickle the emotions, and might even tickle some readers outside the boundaries of a very limited short story aesthetic.