Marly Youmans / The Palace at 2:00 a.m. / poems, stories, novels: In Wilson's Bookmarks

Monday, November 23, 2015

In Wilson's Bookmarks

from Wilson's Bookmarks (see column here)
in "Christianity Today" (print/online)
23 November 2015

This is one of the strangest books I have read in a long while, and also one of the best. It is a novel based on the life of Texas writer Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian and many other memorable characters. Spoiler alert: Youmans’s protagonist, Conall Weaver, commits suicide at the outset, just as Howard did (at age 30), and the story proceeds in reverse chronology. Does this sound daunting? It isn’t at all, if you read with a child’s willingness to be astonished and a grown-up’s hard-won hope that somehow our tangled lives are part of a larger Story, the outlines of which we glimpse even now.

2 comments:

RTD10:29 PM, November 23, 2015
Brava! What a lovely pre-holiday gift. Savor the warmth.
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Alas, I must once again remind large numbers of Chinese salesmen and other worldwide peddlers that if they fall into the Gulf of Spam, they will be eaten by roaming Balrogs. The rest of you, lovers of grace, poetry, and horses (nod to Yeats--you do not have to be fond of horses), feel free to leave fascinating missives and curious arguments.

Youmans (pronounced like 'yeoman' with an 's' added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers --John Wilson, editor, Books and Culture. Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet out of sync with the times but in tune with the ages --First Things. I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous & haunting --novelist Sebastien Doubinsky. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness & beauty --Jeffery Beam.