From Publishers Weekly
Required reading for those who've read the three previous volumes of The Lampitt Papers books, this novel may hold less interest for others new to the series. Yet Wilson's always trenchant comments on the art of writing, the social comedy of the British class system, the effects of memory and the workings of the Church are stimulating in themselves, even when the plot slows to accommodate flashbacks to the earlier stories. Julian Ramsey, radio performer, stage actor and aspiring biographer of Edwardian belletrist James Petworth Lampitt, is now 65, a "lonely skinny old man" in New York in the year 2000. Julian narrates some chapters; others are third-person flashbacks to events that occurred during the 1960s. The narrative accrues to a lifetime of "hearing voices," the ongoing inner dialogue in which Julian recalls friends, incidents, desires, unrequited love, matters of conscience, desolations and epiphanies-memories that are much "truer" than any biography can ever be, Wilson suggests. Here, Julian finally has an insight about how the deaths of "Jimbo" Lampitt and of the wealthy American collector of his work, Virgil Everett, are related, though this will come as no surprise to the reader. Meanwhile, events leading up to the Pope's encyclical banning birth control have a bearing on the plot; and some devastatingly funny scenes of the drug culture and of politically correct dinner parties paint a typically British picture of the States. Wilson is always worth reading for his literate prose and his wit, but the tone here is so somber that readers are more than prepared for the emotional downer of the funeral that ends the novel.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
As we move into the fourth volume of Wilson's
Lampitt Papers, the series is beginning to acquire not only the breadth and heft but also the texture and resonance of Anthony Powell's 12-volume
Dance to the Music of Time. Both series attempt to bring modern British history down to a manageable human scale, focusing not on great events but on small particulars in the lives of an interrelated group of middle-and upper-class English people. Jumping between the 1960s and the year 2000, we pick up the story with Julian Ramsay, now an aging thespian, performing a one-man show based on the life and work of James Petworth ("Jimbo" ) Lampitt, the most well known of the family that has obsessed first Julian's uncle Roy and then Julian himself throughout their lives. A meeting with an old friend, Mary Margaret Nolan, sends the actor's mind back to the 1960s, when the murder of the collector of the Lampitt papers rekindled gossip over the problematic death of Jimbo himself. As always, Wilson is less concerned with pinning down who killed whom, or who slept with whom, than he is with reflecting on "the mercurial quality of human characters and their interactions." For readers of similar sensibility, this supremely ironic yet finally compassionate look at British society remains one of the sustaining pleasures of contemporary fiction.
Bill Ott
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
