Nate D's Reviews > Talk

There's a kind of false transparency about this (taped conversations between friends chatting on the beach in the Hamptons in 1965 transcribed as "novel") that belies Rosenkrantz's deftness in piecing these three lives together from the countless more she recorded as sources. The result is warm, strongly characterized, and precisely sequenced. It's also very funny, off-handedly funny because the characters are so full realized and likeable (how could people so real be in fact composites!?) that their patterns of thought and interaction take on a rare immediacy. (Contrast with the unfunniness (to me) of John Barth's arch constructedness -- I'm reading him in parallel). Anyway, this is very New York (albeit the limited part of New York that could afford to lounge on the beach in the Hamptons), very art world (our trio are painter, actress, writer), very 1960s: the self-analytic content of their conversation is generated mostly through the cultural forces of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution. So it's obviously dated, but retains (through its unusual immediacy) a level insight into the human condition undiluted by time. Thoroughly enjoyable.