mourners below

Mourners Below by James Purdy  (Viking, 1981)

Reading this novel was similar to dreaming: the world depicted is vivid and engaging, but unhinged from reality.  The novel takes place in a small mid-western town, where a 17-year-old boy lives with his father.  The mother ran off many years ago, and the father and son are attended to by a neighbor woman who acts as cook and housekeeper.  The boy is a promising figure skater (!) but his father has put the kibosh  on his Olympic dreams, so  the boy is somewhat adrift: he’s graduated from High School but his grades weren’t good enough to admit him to college, so he’s being tutored by a young scholar who was a friend of the boy’s two older brothers, who were both killed in action in WWII.  The cold, domineering father refuses to acknowledge, let alone mourn, the loss of his two eldest sons, and the boy is devastated and lost without his two god-like older brothers.  The only person who shows him any warmth or concern is the housekeeper, but the father does his best to keep a distance between this warm and caring woman and his son.  

What plot exists concerns the machinations of a very young and wealthy widow, who had taken Justin, one of the boy’s brothers, as her lover, to seduce the boy and bear his child, which she succeeds in doing by giving a costume ball to which the boy is invited.  There is an intense dream-like eroticism to just about every interaction in the book, and feelings of incest and homosexuality figure in many of these relationships.  Like Eustace Chisholm and the Works, which I read subsequently, this book ends with a scene of gruesome sexual torture and violation.  A strange, mysterious and moving book, which simultaneously combines Purdy’s daring and decency.