Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Meat Loaf
By Stephen Spender
What's for Dinner?
by James Schuyler
Black Sparrow Press, 197 pp., $4.50 (paper)
In this quietly scarifying, very funny, and wonderfully compassionate novel, the poet James Schuyler invents over-lapping scenes describing middle-class suburban Americans leading some of them 'normal' and apparently healthy lives and others lives which are 'mentally disturbed.' The action alternates between 'homes'—those of the Taylor family, the widow Mag Carpenter, and the consciously eccentric Trompers—and the ward of a hospital where patients are receiving treatment for mental breakdowns of various kinds. Normal and disturbed gather in the 'family group' therapeutic sessions which take place in a wing of the large general neighborhood hospital, where all discuss their 'problems,' under the guidance of Dr. Kearney, 'a young man with red hair' who, as he explains, is there 'just to audit and put in my oar now and then.'
Review, 1761 words
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