From Library Journal
This collection of four novellas places Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All) in the pantheon of America's best storytellers. Indeed, the title novella, an ode to a great aunt who takes an artistically inclined young boy under her wing and shows him through kindness the meaning of love, won the National Magazine Prize. In it, the narrator imagines the grand romantic adventure she, as the daughter of an impoverished immigrant, never had. Each of the tales explores the impact that one individual can have on another and how courage and beauty can arise from the most unexpected sources. There is the young preservationist dying of AIDS whose joy in saving old homes never falters and whose smile in the face of death continues to bring happiness to his survivors. There is the pillar of the community whose sudden disgrace confirms a young boy's determination to tell the truth, to be out in the world. Lastly, there is "Saint Monster" the amazingly "ugly" man whose love and devotion to his son transcends race, public humiliation, and even death so that in the end, for the narrator, even "the bilge [flung by a fish leaping suddenly from a weedy canal at a moment of enlightenment] tasted like shrimp, like rust, a life: my dry mouth savoring every drop." These stories may all arise from Gurganus's Carolina home soil, but their messages are universal in scope. Highly recommended.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1988) presents a collection of three long short stories and one short novel, with mixed results. In "The Practical Heart," the narrator recalls the proclivities of his great-aunt, daughter of a Scottish immigrant to Chicago. The reader is teased into perhaps believing she had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, but the whole story comes across as arch and gimmicky. "Preservation News" is a fey portrait of a man who has just lost his battle with AIDS but who spent his last breath in the pursuit of the preservation of historic properties; however, the storytelling voice is too cloying. But "He's One, Too" offers an ironically sympathetic portrayal of a married man arrested for lewd acts with a younger man. And in the longest and most moving piece, "Saint Monster," a son remembers how the relationship between his ugly but kind father and his beautiful but faithless mother forced him into prematurely dealing with the rawer aspects of adulthood. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Gurganus is an old-fashioned yarn spinner. . . . [The Practical Heart] reanimates all those familiar truths about art’s power to transform and redeem.” –The New York Times
“As intriguing as it is deadly funny. . . . An entertaining, disturbing, and inspiring book . . . [from] one of our greatest living raconteurs.” –The Atlantic Monthly
“Gurganus’s commitment to the importance of suffering and the power of art to redeem it, so like Henry James’, blows through [these stories] like a cold wind of truth.” –Newsday
“There is no other American writer working from his recipe, and nobody dishing it out with such full-throated gusto.” –The Washington Post
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
In his fictional Falls, North Carolina?a watchful zone of stifling mores?Allan Gurganus?s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, betrayal. Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while creating a rarely-glimpsed world of valor, minor grandeur, side-street heroics.
Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted grand-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and 18th-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths?sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming?from human hearts as immense as they are local.
From the Back Cover
"This collection places Gurganus in the pantheon of America's best storytellers...These stories may all arise from Gurganus's Carolina home soil, but their messages are universal in scope. Highly recommended."
-- Library Journal
"The four novellas that make up The Practical Heart recall the four chambers of the organ that gives this collection its name. . . . Each of these first-person accounts of outsiders keeps readers guessing with unexpected twists. . . . The book's knotty prose, dense with description, is the perfect vehicle for these intricate yarns. Gurganus is a gifted storyteller--always surprising, entertaining and, finally, enlightening."
--Time Out New York
About the Author
Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. The title novella of this book won the National Magazine Prize. His other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
from the novella "The Practical Heart"
THE IMPRACTICAL TRUTH
Fact is is is Fable.
—james merrill
I. Passport
I did have a Great-aunt Muriel. Also true how one misguided streetcar stranded her whole family for life. By 1890, Muriel’s dashing father, author of the out-of-print Lotus Images in World Literature: A Reflection, debarred from university library privileges, fired from being “Raffles” of The Racing News, impatient at teaching holy English to mere Asia Minor foreigners, was forced at last to undertake full-frontal “trade.”
In a literary irony no sane writer would go near, he ended his career selling tablecloths and matching napkins at Marshall Field and Co., the very items from the same store that had accessorized his wife’s tragedy. With his groomed white beard and Longfellow grandeur, the man was put to use as a nine-to-five visual aid for women hoping to make their tables appear respectable as he. Ladies naturally gravitated toward a gent almost distinguished-looking enough to pose as some Scottish professor who’d published four books, who’d inherited a nineteen-room freehold house worthy of a name. Donald Fraser appeared, in fact, someone distinguished enough to have lost everything, and survived.
Maybe that—and not a family Sargent—becomes the lasting, ultimate Distinction? To have forfeited all your class trappings, but to remain somewhat standing. Here’s hoping that counts. It might be my own unlucky family’s single chance at amounting to anything, at getting on record. And might that matter? I have no choice, given our history, our story, but to believe it does. —Odd that “History wished” should be so much easier to tell than “History merely if bravely lived.”
In your own life, don’t you find that?
For Donald Fraser’s sixtieth birthday, daughters gave him a pair of lively English water spaniels. Dogs soon accompanied him everywhere except Field’s “Fancy Linen Goods.” The esteemed Professor, long deprived of his property, his classroom audience, finally stopped saying, “No one ever list-ens to me.” Now his dogs did. He named them Sonny and Sadie. Muriel was quiet in noting how much these names, uttered all together, recalled the word “Sunnyside.” He’d say, “Come Sonny/Sadie, my poor landlocked creatures. Shall we stroll our bit o’ lakefront and see what erosion’s left us since last night?” In spaniels’ unwavering respect, the old man seemed to recover some of his sense of home, of honor, even humor. The pretty animals, flanking him, rendered this once-forbidding patriarch picturesque. Fraser became less a skulking fugitive of the lakeside park, more an official greeter on this estate he did not own. He indulged the pets just as his young daughters—without his ever quite suspecting—had shielded him. To Sonny and Sadie, he quoted Gaelic poetry that they alone seemed able to enjoy. Ears perked, heads tilting, they stared up at him with a helpless trust unseen for decades from his kin merely American.
My actual Aunt Muriel wore a pince-nez all her life. She possessed a beautiful contralto speaking voice. It seemed richer than her face and wider than the fragile partridge neck. Her Glasgow accent still lived—a cushy burr—beneath the Midwest’s layered brass. Aunt’s hair went gray when she was twenty-some; she wore it pulled back in a bun to “keep it out of the way.” She had one good friend, named Jewel. A family joke, how Muriel carried a tight-furled black umbrella even on days half sunny. As a child, I recall Aunt Muriel’s always smelling clean yet clerical. It was a minty, neutral scent, like the glue on a good business envelope. If she was agitated, her aroma could upgrade to that of Twining’s English Breakfast Tea steeping after being violently at boil. One personable widower called on her during the entire summer of 1908, but either he was married or lost interest or moved, or all three. His name, it is recalled with a bitter retentiveness peculiar to poor literate families, was “Stan,” “Stan” Something.
After trying, as a young woman, to teach piano, Muriel Fraser found her pupils no more lucrative or socially notable than the twin daughters of a Bengali hemp-importer and the handsome son of her own Presbyterian pastor. Thanks to the secretarial pool of her sister Ethel, she finally took a day job. Quickly accomplished at the new shorthand, being blessed with a most avid intellect, Miss Fraser spent the next forty-seven years serving as executive secretary to a fifth vice-president of the International Harvester Company, the fellow charged with manufacturing bailers and crop-binding twines. —Musical yet hardheaded, trim yet faintly asexual, cheerful if not visibly ecstatic or excessive, blessed with the ripe speaking voice but a thin singing one, Muriel never married, devoting herself to her difficult, wounded, attractive parents.
My question is: Why her? Of all the family members held up to my kid brother and myself as excellent American examples, Miss Muriel Evangeline Kilkairn Fraser was never cited once.
I came of age in eastern North Carolina but often wrote to my favorite of “The Fraser Girls.” Savoring such exclamatory illustrated childhood bulletins, Muriel determined I could draw, or was trying hard. So, in the margins of her own terse letters, she started sketching quarter-notes with faces, wispy stick figures playing drums or horns. She assured me, age eight, that artistic genes coursed, wild, through our family. Muriel prepared me for the onslaught of my own latent brilliance—brilliance at doing what, she didn’t yet say. Maybe she preferred not to limit me? Aunt saw predictive traces of my good mind everywhere; and who was I to contradict her? She foretold Prizes, in much the way my parents hinted at a cruel Puberty waiting dead ahead. I preferred Aunt’s verdict.
Kids along our suburban North Carolina street were force-fed lessons in ballroom dancing, dressage, and piano, even the boys. I endured three years of dreary Czerny exercises. One of Aunt’s notes told me, with what seemed glossy sophistication, “Czerny has few great supporters, no? The very word ‘Czerny’ means, of course, ‘black’ in Czech.” This fact I tried, with uneven success, to wedge into conversations at grammar-school marble games. Nobody had the slightest idea what I meant. Looking back, I see that happened often. It helps explain how much, between trips North, I longed for the snobbish certainties of a brisk, unlikely woman my father called Miss Mouse.
Mother caught me admiring one of Muriel’s little illustrated notes and said, “How dear. She’s like our own Beatrix Potter, isn’t she? Only without the talent.” Christmases, Aunt might send my younger brother a ski sweater or some cowboy wallet—his name burned there in lasso script. But, upon me, Great-aunt Muriel lavished the most exquisite of art supplies. The expensive candy of Winsor Newton tubed watercolors, paper so rich with rag no frame was needed to help it stand. Such supplies were always beautifully gift-wrapped by Marshall Field’s. (Our family’s fate seemed as bound to that emporium as some clans to, say, the Roman Catholic Church.)
In Falls, North Carolina, you could only buy artist’s equipment in one corner of our better hardware store. On sale beside a tray of pink bathtub-plugs, such local paint smacked less of art than carpentry. —Just before Christmas, I would roll the best of my whole year’s work into a brown mailing tube. (She never didn’t like my efforts!) Her gifts led me to check out art books from our local library. I found one, The Underappreciated Singer Sargent, and, applying the idea of being underrated to her and to myself, renewed the book and renewed it. Muriel insured my love with her annual bundle, the finest art supplies mere money could buy. I swear, with those, she half-created me. And this.
I felt related to her. There was something in how Muriel, though cohabiting with family, lived so visibly alone. Something in her own appetite for study, her faith in the “National Geographic Society” (whose expeditions she hinted she helped fund). Something in her morbid breath-mint fear of imposing on others. Something in her gluttonous eyes, her Museum memberships, her relish for facts, her extraordinary memory and its companion, sympathy. All these drew me, like predictions.
Masquerading as a boy, I weakened with gratitude whenever Aunt—recognizing one of my emerging qualities—mailed me some sketch or playbill. My local teachers worried I “exaggerated.” They claimed I was cursed with a “perhaps morbid and surely over-vivid imagination” (a direct quote). Short of driving you to criminal acts, can the Imagination be too vivid? Can a wish have too much ballast, too much invented History? Can a person’s life be over-alive? And to Whom should we apologize for too much Seeing?
My parents fretted: Miss Mouse was overstimulating me. “Something here from one of your more elderly girlfriends,” they held her good blue stationery in their big oily paws. Such jealousy bewildered me. But then I could lock my room’s door, could settle on my bed in stocking feet, could plant the reading glasses on my snub freckled nose, could study both sides of the envelope before tearing into her fresh packet of lore.
Muriel had a nickname for me. It was based on one of my infant mishearings: she’d planted me in her bony lap while perusing pages of the Geographic. At a picture of some jowly black-robed Caribbean judge, she read the caption, “His Honor,” but I somehow heard “His Owl.” This delighted her, not as a lapse, but an invention. She rep...
