Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
Breakdowns
By Robert M. Adams
A Family Romance
by Richard Wollheim
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 255 pp., $5.95
Camden's Eyes
by Austin Wright
Doubleday (A Paris Review Editions Novel), 336 pp., $5.95
Sick Friends
by Ivan Gold
E.P. Dutton, 372 pp., $6.95
T Zero
by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt, Brace & World, 152 pp., $4.95
We are at a lavish, dizzy party, a kaleidoscope. It is taking place in a penthouse like a prairie, where one beautiful, enormous room opens into another, where the terraces open onto a landscape of jeweled, smoky city, where the Renoirs on the wall compete with Rouaults, where unobtrusive, omnipresent servants glide like serpents across ankle-deep carpets, summoning silver trays like settling doves out of the atmosphere. Someone who looks like (but it can't be!) Blink, the star of stage, screen, and box, is talking about shooting water-buffalo last week in the Outer Catamarans, and a knot over there is discussing (while sampling) the mysteries of Caspian caviar. Buzz, tinkle, clatter. The drinks are—was that the host saying, 'Of course, we have our own distillery'? A clink of ice, a rustle of taffeta, a burst of laughter, a voice out of nowhere saying, 'And that's why he never….' A laughing witch in a red dress is caught, as in a spotlight, over by the piano. Murmur, rattle, splash, mmmmmm, ha, I'd love to, didn't we once, but what a wonderful idea, thanks I'd better not, did that really happen, and did you ever see eyelashes like that?
Review, 3200 words
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