William Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, portraying religious revivalism and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. His narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.
A young boy with pitcher ears sits in a closet, hunched over paper piano keys pasted onto a piece of cardboard. The boy’s mother has made him the cardboard piano so he can practice silently, without fear of discovery by his father; in this East Texas home in the 1920s, the longing for artistic expression is a punishable offense, at least for a boy.
In his revealing new biography of the writer William Goyen, It Starts with Trouble, Clark Davis offers this episode from Goyen’s childhood as a kind of primal scene: a boy forced so deep into himself by a stern father and well-meaning mother that his artistry develops as a desperate, autotelic feedback loop, masterful eloquence in search of a listener. As metaphor, the closet is almost too perfect — especially given that Goyen’s artistic urges grew in tandem with, and seem to have become intertwined with, intense and nonconforming sexual urges. Even as his writing began to find a limited but appreciative audience, Goyen’s bisexuality remained, for lack of a better word, closeted; throughout the more permissive 1970s and until his death in 1983, the open secret fueled some of his strangest and most inventive fiction.
Title: Come, The Restorer
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc, Garden City, New York
Publication Date: 1974
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: 1st Edition
Donated by Larry Lingle - Lobo Books