[Robert Nye gives Tito Perdue’s Lee a bad review. An interesting exercise in missing the point. Nye notices the absence of plot and spends a lot of ink on it. But this does not seem to have reminded him to attend to the book’s other riches. From ‘Read between the Lines and Find a Full Stop,’ The Guardian (7 November 1991), p. 28. Excerpted here for enthusiasts and the bibliographically curious.]
Tito Perdue’s Lee is described by its publisher as being ‘in the tradition of the early Faulkner’. You know what that means: it reads as if it were written by Benjy, the idiot brother in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner had the sense to write only a quarter of his stuff in this style, and in any case he artfully made an art of its unintelligibility, whereas Perdue is just artless and opaque.
His main character is Lee, an angry old man who keeps getting out of bed. Once out of bed he rages about a bit, then he goes home. Sometimes a chapter will begin with him not getting out of bed, then he will lie there thinking, much in the manner of Winnie the Pooh, though not half as profoundly. Chapter Eight even begins with Lee waking up under the bed. This is of great significance in a novel in which nothing really happens otherwise, but unfortunately it is too much for our novelist’s narrative sense and he never explains how the old man got there. Oh yes, and Lee has a rash and haemorrhoids that are sometimes said to be ‘throbbing’.
It is all very sad, the saddest part being that its author is described as a sometime apprentice insurance underwriter and library administrator who has now given up these vocations to pursue a career as a full-time writer.
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