The Party at Jack's: A Novella

Stutman and Idol offer a generous and judicious working draft of an ambitious novel, some of which Wolfe's posthumous editor, Edward C. Aswell, included in his version of You Can't Go Home Again. Set in Manhattan at the zenith of the Jazz Age, the story concerns a "power couple" who exemplify the ambition, idealism, infatuations, compromise, materialism, and tragedy of a time and place that did much to define American culture. The opening chapters essay a multileveled psychological and behavioral portrait of the husband, Friederick Jack. The meditative pace, reminiscent of Goncharov or Proust, is energized by some of Wolfe's most daring and experimental writing. The main thread of the book, however, begins with Wolfe's parallel portrait of the wife, Esther Jack. The party at Jack's is her party, and Wolfe takes great pains to portray in frank detail the social, sexual, creative, and moral dichotomies revealed by the big event. You can feel Wolfe trying to work through his own conflicting emotions as he develops this work. He makes no attempt to hide his discomfort with aesthetics and lifestyles that celebrate ironic detachment or that privilege form over content. Yet just when he seems to risk a descent into merely reflexive criticism of the jazz decade, Wolfe pushes the story (through convincing plot details) into new places where it pulses with empathy and achieves transcendence. In the end, the novel is a portrait of human caring and blindness, filled with colorful details of its era. Although redundant sentences and descriptive adjectives throughout indicate the state of draft, I found it hard to put down.

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