An Elegy for September
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
He is fifty, a man of middle years with a weak heart and two failed marriages. Mourning the loss of the boundless energy he squandered as a young man, he is a creature of habit now, relying on daily patterns to pace himself, to conserve what is left. She is nineteen, young enough to be his daughter, full of the vitality of youth and fearless—or perhaps only blind to the dangers life brings. Spare and moving, An Elegy for September captures the turning point in the life of a man as he confronts his own mortality—and confronts truths about himself he never suspected. Featuring some of John Nichols’s best writing, An Elegy for September is a brief, poignant, and eloquent novel that renders an age-old story in a fresh and powerful form.
“One of the finest things he has ever written.”—Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nichols enjoys a sizable cult reputation on the strength of his New Mexico trilogy ( The Milagro Beanfield War ; The Magic Journey ; The Nirvana Blues ) , but it is hard to imagine any but the staunchest of his supporters finding much to cheer about in his latest work. Slender both literally and metaphorically, Elegy tells the story of an unnamed novelist who, like Nichols, is 51 years old and lives in New Mexico. The protagonist suffers from heart trouble and is in the middle of his second divorce when he begins receiving fan letters from a 19-year-old college student (``the same age as his daughter'') who has fallen in love with him through his writing. She comes west for a three-week writing seminar and they begin a brief, intense affair that ends when, considering the future implications of the difference in their ages, he begins to withdraw into a self-protective shell. The young woman is neither appealing nor believable, the man is a morass of self-pity, and the novel is a ponderous array of cliches. The situation reeks of mid-life male fantasizing, and its muted collapse leaves the reader unmoved. The book comes to life only when Nichols writes of mountain terrain, through which his protagonist moves with a satisfying ease.
