Brightfellow
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This novel of a troubled life lived on the fringes of a college campus “casts a lingering spell” (The New York Times). A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. From “one of the most interesting American writers around” (The Nation), this is a fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and emotional deformity. “Anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence.” —Publishers Weekly “Vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters, and the striking perspective of an emotionally stunted man in a carefully controlled society…unique and captivating.” —Booklist “Brimming with lyrical descriptions of the campus and with ornamental characters representing various academic ‘types,’ Brightfellow is both a portrait of small town American campus life and of the peculiarities of childhood.” —Manhattan Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ducornet has made an estimable career mining often bizarre, horrifying, or otherwise unpredictable territory. This novel is perhaps her most accessible book, which she achieves without sacrificing the trademark fluidity of her language or her penchant for making heroes out of odd and unlikely figures. The hero is Stub, a damaged and orphaned teenager who hangs around a college campus, masquerading as a student named Charter Chase. He eats food he steals from houses and lives in the storage room of the library. There, Stub/Charter becomes the devoted reader of a reclusive and ignored philosopher named Verner Vanderloon, whose works of eccentric anthropology include Primates in Paradise and Cannibal Ways; Stub also becomes fascinated with Asthma, the child of a local history professor. In the singular and enchanted Asthma who lectures her toys, speculates on the religious leanings of the beetles in her backyard, and renames Stub "Brightfellow" Stub finds a dreamer like himself. After he is adopted by doddering professor emeritus William Sweetbriar, the two become a sort of ersatz family to the young imposter. But Stub is harboring secrets no one suspects, and just as the discovery of his charade comes to seem inevitable, his obsession with Asthma takes a darker turn. Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence.
