Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
Flowering Porter
By Charles Baxter
Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue
Library of America, 1,093 pp., $40.00
Katherine Anne Porter is a case of a writer whose last fiction seemed oddly ill-matched with the work that preceded it. Readers of a certain age may remember the literary hoopla surrounding the publication of her only novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962. A work of twenty years' labor, the book was reviewed everywhere, called 'a great work of art' by Mark Schorer, went onto the best-seller list, and was sold to the movies for $400,000. The author's shrewd, imperious visage appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review and other publications. But readers who actually bothered to start this 497-page novel did not often finish it. Finally a critic told the truth about the book: Theodore Solotaroff, in a long essay-review in Commentary, did an inventory of its faults that still seems, from a distance of over four decades, definitive and irrefutable.
Review, 4661 words
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