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Product Description:
A Long Day's Dying is a mid-twentieth-century Jamesian novel that foreshadows many of the themes in Mr. Buechner's later writing—faith, trust, and the complex relations of family and friends. The story follows Tristram Bone, a rotund man of wealth and "organized leisure" but a failure with women, and Elizabeth Poor, a rich, charming, and beautiful widow and Bone's unrequited love interest, through a series of encounters with friends and family, affairs real and imagined, gossip, jealousy, and innuendo. We also meet Bone's servant Emma and his pet monkey Simon; the novelist George Motley; the arrogant and seductive academic Paul Steitler, Elizabeth's naïve son Lee, and her omniscient mother Maroo.
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Average Rating : 
Rating : - One of the Great American Novels!
Frederick Buechner is now, at 80 years of age, highly respected and well known for his teachings and writings centered on the spiritual life. Brook Street Press will change that in introducing this reprint of Buechner's brilliant 1950 novel A LONG DAY'S DYING written just prior to his 'finding Christianity', and while the novel was highly acclaimed when it was first published, it has all but disappeared from his bibliography of biblically oriented works of fiction and non-fiction. This novel is simply brilliant, a reader's delight, and a hugely successful work despite the fact that it demands much from those who enter its realm.
Buechner writes in a dense, near stream of consciousness style that is reminiscent (in the finest sense) of the works of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Michael Cunningham, and William Faulkner. Strange company, this? Well, just try to jump into Buechner in media res and see if the clues are not there. His small but indelible cast of characters includes Tristram Bone (an obese, wealthy, unlucky in love eloquent man) who lives with his German housekeeper Emma and his pet monkey Simon. He is friends with a novelist, one George Motley (a novelist who lives in his own world); Elizabeth Poor (an elegant wealthy widow who attracts men like flypaper); her young handsome Adonis son Leander and Leander's oddly intrusive friend Paul Steitler, a young professor whose attentions with all those he meets are seductive; and Maroo, Elizabeth's stalwart prickly mother who seems to have the best handle on everyone and whose journey through live offers a bastion of philosophy! The story simply unfolds the interrelationships of these odd people, weaving them into a tapestry so intricate and eloquent that the product is dazzling. Trysts, rumors of trysts, peculiar encounters and imagined relationships twist in and out of the story, all bathed in the luminous language of Buechner. 'Morning sunlight in long horizontals through the latticed blinds serenely puzzled the wide room by singling here and there disconnected shapes of brightness for predominance. One spray of a sea-green glass vaseful of lilacs caught the light and. like a wing, dipped through the shadow...' These verbal settings abound, wrapping the characters in shawls of beauty as they act out their peculiar ways of approaching friendship and affairs.
Reading Beuchner should be a slow process. Though the story is propulsive, it is thick with asides that demand attention if the lush eloquence of the language is to be appreciated. A LONG DAY'S DYING has some very important points about life to make, but it is the journey through the magnificent landscape of Beuchner's language that is the inimitable joy of reading this gratefully restored novel. Highly Recommended for serious readers. Grady Harp, May 06
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