BALDUR'S GATE

by Eleanor Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 1970

Miss Clark's first book since The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1966) has many of the traditional virtues of the old New England town in which it is framed with such irreproachable detail--namely presence and composure and an enduring remembrance of things past. Its enjoyment, however, may be a question of taste, and time, since for the most part it fails to establish any very definite contact with the characters at hand or the story it fails to get going. Eva returns to the Jordan of her childhood with her shiftless, handsome husband Lucas and one youngster, there to submit impressionably to the town's two notables; one the aging sculptor Baldur, a powerful visionary even if he has spent the last nine years in an alcoholic haze; and Jack Pryden (later revealed to be Baldur's son via the local grande dame) who has become a famous neurologist but now has lapsed into a kind of self-bound inanition. Expectably Eva has an affair with Jack. But the central part of the book deals with Baldur's grand conception of The Project (a cheapening development scheme, actually) which will revivify the town but then collapses, and the intent of the book is perhaps to convey the despoliation of a place and idealism and the kind of default which overtakes most people during the temporizing course of their existence. . . . At one point one of the characters comments ""I just wondered what percent of you was here now"" which is the central difficulty of the book. It suffers from what Henry James called ""weak specification"" in that the attention is diffused over much of what the eye glides over.

Pub Date: June 24, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION