Alfred and Guinevere

By James Schuyler
Introduction by John Ashbery

One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Prose as poetry really should be: among other things fresh, surprising, artful, and clear ... I laughed all through it for three readings in a row—and wholeheartedly, as one can only laugh at something that is also beautiful.
— Kenneth Koch

Also see:

What's For Dinner? By James Schuyler Afterword by James McCourt A bittersweet comedy of "group therapy manners" about cracking up and putting the pieces back together from the writer John Ashbery called "America's greatest poet."

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