Narrow Rooms

James Purdy

Chapters (5)

Cover

James Purdy

NARROW ROOMS

With a new introduction by

GIORDANO TEDOLDI

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Copyright page

Dedication: For James Michael Tillotson and Stephen D. Adams

Narrow Rooms by James Purdy

Originally published by Arbor House in 1978

First Valancourt Books edition 2019

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Narrow Rooms is the most Aeschylean contemporary novel you’ll ever read. It is violent, shocking, disturbing, but, above all, relentless, as Greek fate is. The characters inhabiting or rather haunting the “Mountain State” in which the novel is set may be doctors, farmers, cowboys, or renderers (a word which sounded so ominous when I first found it, and which applies in fact to the novel’s demon) but they may as well be Oedipus or Agamemnon living in Thebes or Mykenes.

Countless writers have tried to revive ancient drama, and countless have failed. Without even attempting to do so, James Purdy succeeds. From the very first paragraph, the reader is taken into a world where nothing matters but the past. And the past carries a curse with it, a curse so ancient and deep that the damned themselves don’t know how to cope with it: “How in hell would I know what’s wrong with me at this late date! […] But I know what I feel, and I know I want to kill him for what I feel and what he has done to me,” says the renderer, the evil spirit of this story. Feeling is what matters, in Purdy’s works, feeling is king. No rationality, no civilization, no understanding of the facts, no knowledge can change the curse. What is the curse? It is human nature that is cursed, according to Purdy. Oedipus is cursed, Thebes is cursed and the whole (human) world is cursed and he can only comply. That’s what all the characters in Narrow Rooms do, they observe their own unraveling without ever trying seriously to stop it, quite the contrary in fact.