The Comedians - Hardcover

L'Heureux, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670829188 ISBN 13: 9780670829187

Publisher: Viking, 1990

Synopsis

A collection of unsettling stories about characters who seem ordinary but who are all saints or artists, including a pregnant comic whose fetus sings to her from the womb

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In this collection of stories and one novella, L'Heureux ( A Woman Run Mad ) explores the possibilities for faith and redemption in a secular age. Suffused with a religious, almost supernatural vision of life's mystery, his Flannery O'Connor-like moral tales expose the perverse secrets hidden in our hearts and capture the irreversible moments in which lives are forever changed. A creative writing teacher in "Poison Girls" suddenly sees himself through the eyes of three students who despise him--and is ruined; in "Comedians" a pregnant stand-up comedian hears her deformed fetus singing. As a character in "Themselves" explains, faith "isn't something you choose, it's something you're given, except that in a way you have to want to choose it." L'Heureux, Lane Professor of Humanities at Stanford, lightens his profoundly serious spiritual load with witty, buoyant prose and an ironic, urbane sensibility.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

In one of the brief lives that make up this collection, an aging choreographer obsessed with the memory of her abusive parents resists "the dark temptation to explore her own soul" in her final work, a period piece celebrating Lizzie Borden's ax murders. In another story, the envious director of a writers' workshop unaccountably forgets the titles of Iris Murdoch's books when introducing her to the class as "the most truly wicked" and exciting writer alive. In fact, L'Heureux himself is a moralist very much in the Murdoch tradition. Trendy topics--everything from the Argentinian "disappeared" to the boom in stand-up comedy--are dragged onstage like unwieldy props in a costume drama. The writing is elegant and assured, the witticisms deft and pithy, but the profundity is pretty much an illusion.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0670829188
• ISBN 13: 9780670829187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224