Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (28 page)

Cabot Wright begins / James Purdy.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-87140-352-0 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-87140-697-2 (e-book)

1. Rapists—Fiction. 2. Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3531.U426C25 2013

813’.54—dc23

2013013133

Liveright Publishing Corporation

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W
I
T 3QT

OTHER NOVELS BY JAMES PURDY

Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue

Reaching Rose

Garments the Living Wear

In the Hollow of His Hand

On Glory’s Course

Mourners Below

Dream Palaces: Three Novels

Narrow Rooms

In a Shallow Grave

The House of the Solitary Maggot

I Am Elijah Thrush

Jeremy’s Version

Eustace Chisholm and the Works

The Nephew

Malcolm

Praise for
Cabot Wright Begins

“James Purdy has succeeded better than anyone else around at the moment in re-creating the U.S.A. and presenting it simultaneously as his own invention and as a faithful reflection of reality—not an easy feat.
Cabot Wright Begins
is a delight all the way through.”

—Paul Bowles

“It might loosely be described as a bravura work of satire—a satire on pornographic fantasy, a satire on New York literary life, a satire on affluent eccentric mid-century America. Except that satire is perhaps too narrow a term to convey the kind of comedy that Purdy writes … but rather the vehicle for a universal comic vision.”

—Susan Sontag,
New York Times Book Review

“His funniest novel.…Few modern novelists have refused so steadfastly to reproduce their last novel all over again, and Mr. Purdy’s courage in denying his admirers with another dose of the old familiar mixture seems to me justified by the regularity with which he produces unexpected yet unmistakably good Purdy products.”

—Angus Wilson,
Observer

“Purdy builds his fiction like the hall of mirrors in a fun house. Which is the real image? One is never sure. Purdy’s vision of modern life has the bonecrushing savagery, the hallucinatory richness and total horror of a bad case of delirium tremens.”

—Conrad Knickerbocker,
Life

“Here is a native Nabokov … it is a wildly funny book, beautifully written and with a deadly serious underlay.”

—
Library Journal

“
Cabot Wright Begins
is not only the most savage of satires on the American way of life—or way of death, as Mr. Purdy would have it; it is an extremely funny book.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“A brilliantly controlled spoof on American sexuality and book publishing.…In the end when Cabot Wright saves his sanity by rolling on the ground with laughter … it is a great moment in contemporary writing.”

—Theodore Solotaroff,
Book Week