Cabot Wright Begins

by James Purdy

Cabot Wright Begins, first published in 1964, may be one of the most neglected masterpieces in post–World War II American literature.

Cabot Wright is a handsome, Yale-educated stockbroker and scion of a good family. He also happens to be the convicted rapist of nearly three hundred women. Bernie Gladhart is a naive used-car salesman from Chicago, who—spurred on by his ambitious wife—decides to travel to Brooklyn and write the Great American Novel about the recently paroled Cabot Wright. As Bernie tries to track down Wright in Brooklyn, he encounters a series of bizarre and Dickensian characters and sets in motion an extraordinary chain of events. In this merciless and outrageous satire of American culture, cult writer James Purdy is unsparing and prophetic in his portrayal of television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work compared to Candide by Susan Sontag. Considered too scabrous for the stifling culture mores of the early 1960s, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" (New York Times).

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, American, Literature, American Fiction

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.
He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles.
Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation.
He worked as an interpreter, and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are great novels. And there are popular novels. And they are worlds apart. Cabot Wright Begins is a great novel so it can’t be popular.
To hell with the smarmy political correctness!

“It may be good business to hire cripples and copulate with Negroes, but by God, Cabot laddie, you and I know better.”

Cabot Wright Begins isn't for hypocrites and sycophants.
Conformity and consumerism anaesthetise society making it deaf and blind and turning human beings into an obedient herd.
The book is sad and it is a final and ultimate roar of laughter.

After all, laughter is the greatest boon Nature has bestowed on miserable unjoyous man. The release, the only relief from the pain of being human, mortal, ugly, limited, in agony, watching Death cornhole you beginning with the first emergence from the winking slit above the mother’s fundament, pulled into existence from between piss and shit, sorrow and meaninglessness, drudgery and illusion, passion, pain, early loss of youth and vigor, of all that had made it worthwhile, with the eternity of the tomb, the final word over the hunger for God, the repletion of earth and slime, the shout of the ocean in the ears of death.

If society hides its abscesses, the pus accumulates and one day there will be a horrendous eruption.

[BlackOxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Viruses Are Top of the Food Chain

Nothing preys on viruses. They float around, like stardust (perhaps they are stardust), without need for defensive weapons waiting patiently for a warm-blooded host. Finding a comfy place in lung or brain or other vital organ, they are almost impossible to dislodge. Excessive heat might slow their progress so fever sets in until the immune system belatedly awakes to the alien onslaught. Then they provoke a sneeze and find something else to feed on. The motiveless cycle continues. Obviously the virus not the human being is top of the planetary food chain. Only arrogance balks at the conclusion.

Cabot Wright, although human, is a virus. He doesn’t infect, or only incidentally; he rapes. At last count at least 300 women.

Bernie, a hen-pecked, ex-con, wannabe writer is a virus hunter. Since viruses are elusive, he must work hard at his job. But Bernie is also a virus. His ‘vector’ is some unneeded and awful prose about Cabot Wright.

Princeton Keith is an over the hill New York publisher who needs Bernie’s book about Cabot Wright to make a splash. Keith’s job is hype and mirrors. He too is a virus. He is the catalyst by which Bernie can reach millions.

Carrie is Bernie’s wife, venal, ambitious for celebrity, manipulative and unfaithful. She sends Bernie in search of Cabot Wright on a whim. Along with her frenemy, Zoe, she is a virus. In fact they are the source, the case zero, who promote the inter-species jump by sleeping with pigs.

Fortunately viruses can act as parasites on other viruses. They don’t eat their fellows but merely dissolve them in a soup of activity that is neither dead nor alive. Purdy’s view of the world seems to be that this is the daily apocalypse in which we all are continuously engaged. Who knows, he may be right. After all, in the 1960’s, when the book was written (and stardust was a big Aquarian thing), we all thought we were headed for a new Ice Age. Viruses would be invulnerable. Then the question was: ‘Is it possible to be immunised?’ Depressingly, Purdy thought not. It’s no picnic at the top.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Purdy gives true expression to the phrase ‘certified genius’, in the dual sense of being iconoclastic as well as possibly bug-fuck insane. Meeting Cabot Wright is one of the weirdest things I have ever read. It is one of those insidious reading experiences that seem to make little sense while you are in the active process of assimilating the text, but which then proceeds to seep into your consciousness.

If you like genre fiction in any form – from SF to New Weird and plain old vanilla horror – then do yourself a favour and read Purdy. You will be amazed at what you will (re)discover about what you thought you knew about literature.

It is incredible to think that this novel – with its very modern concerns about marginality and the writing process itself – was published in 1964. On one level, it is a quite lurid attack on the American Dream, as represented by New York City:

You are living in the wickedest city which ever existed, making storied Babylon child’s play, for at least the Babylonians felt and relished their sins. You sin not even knowing the stab of your wickedness, not even, oh flock, gaining pleasure from your transgressing as did that ancient city on the Euphrates. You sin not through appetite for it, but through sheer spiritual emptiness and bodily numbers.

A prime sinner in this regard is the fabled figure of Cabot Wright himself, tried, convicted and fresh out of jail (though his ultimate rehabilitation is always in question), for a staggering 300+ rapes of women (the number 360 is bandied about at one stage).

The novel’s rather preposterous plot sees Bernie dispatched by his doting wife to Brooklyn to track down the serial rapist and interview him for a novel, which she is convinced will be a bestseller due to its sensationalist nature. Her chief injunction to her husband is to turn “truth into fiction”.

The publisher then dispatches the wife’s best friend, Zoe, to Brooklyn to ensure Bernie remains on track (and, if need be, take over the project). “We need you, dear Zoe, for the English language and for brains. Nobody else can give us those but you.”

To complicate the literary allusions even further, Zoe’s own husband, Curt is (of course) a failed writer. This leads to a much extended riff, almost like a jazz refrain throughout the novel, about bad books becoming bestsellers and good books being ignored (sadly, a fate that befell Purdy himself in the end).

Zoe gets to read Bernie’s attempt at a novel, which tells the weird and wonderful life story of Cabot Wright himself, “a most supposititious child”, who (of course) is not the monster we think him to be, but rather “the mythical clean-cut American youth out of Coca-Cola ads, church socials, picnics along the lakes.”

So far so good. But this is where things really start to get weird, as Zoe gets to finally meet the fabled Cabot Wright himself. Only to learn he suffers from memory loss, and is awaiting the arrival of a true novelist to restore his life to himself (needless to say, both Zoe and Bernie fail the test).

Bernie lets his imagination get the better of him when he writes that Cabot Wright, desperate to find a cure for sleeplessness, submits himself to the ministrations of a quack doctor, which has the unfortunate side-effect of unleashing his monstrous sexual appetite.

Said doctor reappears later in a new guise as the head of an anti-deviancy movement that proposes, among other things, to attach micro radio transmitters to the rectums of all new-born babies “so that the least indication of their becoming deviate would be detected from birth on”.

This is a mere glimpse of the kind of inspired insanity that the novel collapses into towards the end. One thinks it starts off weirdly, only to realise that this is actually Purdy’s own version of reality … what he himself considers weird is truly, truly strange.

Purdy not only defies (and confuses the shit out of) convention, but makes this wildly improbable novel cohere in a demented kind of way that seems like an impossible feat of literary fleet-footedness. This is mainly due to the brilliance of Purdy’s writing and the immense fun he has with language.

Over-the-top as the characters are, and as half-baked as the plot is, there is an earnestness and an anger here that is quite excoriating. I cannot even begin to think what the literary establishment must have thought of this when it was first published.

And who is the mysterious James Purdy himself? Born in Hicksville, Ohio (of all places) in 1914, he passed away in 2009 at the grand old age of 95, in relative obscurity, I believe. Gone were the halcyon days of being feted by luminaries such as Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.

This adds a note of such sadness to Cabot Wright Begins, which the author did not realise at the time was such a fitting elegy for his own career as a purveyor of that ultimate feat, of turning truth into fiction.

[Michael Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone has their own version of Cabot. In a world where none of those versions really match what actually happened, truth can't exist. And to put it bluntly, nobody cares. True or false isn't the point, what matters is the effect you create. That's a world ruled by the media.
Brilliant.

[Daniel Krolik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is dangerous, insane, and batshit crazy writing from an author I didn't know existed up until a month ago, and I am so glad I found him. Like an acid tinged Mad Men or Revolutionary Road, Purdy takes on the hypocrisies of mainstream, wealthy urban America circa 1964, and exposes the anger festering underneath. Cabot Wright Begins is totally ahead of its time and hasn't dated itself or lost its power to shock one bit. Purdy creates an almost endearing and sympathetic title character, which is remarkable given that he is a recently paroled serial rapist. A fascinating and difficult tale of our lack of responsibility in choosing our cultural heroes, and the gleeful, glorious trip we are all taking to hell in a handbasket.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The primogeniture to American Psycho.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

'In this merciless and outrageous satire of American culture, cult writer James Purdy is unsparing and prophetic in his portrayal of television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work compared to Candide by Susan Sontag. Considered too scabrous for the stifling culture mores of the early 1960s, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" (New York Times).'

I have read that this was the beginning of the end of NY 'literary world' love affair with James Purdy - though any author today might be jealous of a neglect that allowed him subsequent to 'Cabot Wright Begins' to publish another 27 novels, short story and poetry collections published before dying at 95 in 2009 his life encompassing nearly 44% of the years the USA has existed. But Purdy was always ahead of his time - 'Cabot Wright Begins' was too much for an America emerging from the Eisenhower years - it is a pity that it was not recognized as the brilliant satire of almost everything America was and would be. Unfortunately by the time another writer decided to satirize television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work that was not in any way comparable to Candide it would be 1987 and 'Vanity Fair' by Tom Wolfe possible one of the worst books ever written, yet it has over 3,000 reviews on GR to 35 for Cabot Wright Begins.

This is an absurdist masterpiece and if there is an heir to Candide this is it, but how many of us have actually read Candide? and Cabot Wright Begins? Susan Sontag, but who is she I hear the multitudes ask, that says it all.

Cabot Wright begins is unique, because all Purdy's fictions are unique - they are bizarre and completely inimitable because his vision was both bizarre and inimitable. Purdy could be seen as the granddaddy of all transgressive fiction except that so much current transgressive fiction is embarrassingly shallow and unoriginal. He is 'Gothick' the way Poe or Walpole is Gothick, not Ann Rice, and has absolutely nothing to do with 'southern gothic'.

I think the novel is brilliant but not Purdy's best though I give it all the accolades I have awarded his other books. For me it doesn't quite stand out from its time the way his other novels do. Although the novel is not a satire on rape, maybe it would be less disturbing if it was. Let's be clear it wasn't only having a rapist at its heart that disturbed the first readers of Cabot Wright Begins but it did disturb many. By the time Tom Wolfe wrote Bonefire of the Vanities the crime was vehicular homicide, nobody was offended by that. It would be the same today, murder being much more acceptable entertainment fodder. I don't know that that really says very much in our favour.

If you've never read anything else by Purdy this might not be the novel to start with but I don't know which one to recommend. Purdy is the greatest American writer post WWII but you won't find many people to agree with that statement. Maybe he is someone you have to discover yourself, accidentally, and only then do you realise that he speaks to you.

worth reading a piece on Purdy from The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under...

[Fergus Menner]

Crazy that this came out in the same year as Bellow's Herzog, 1964. That novel, albeit also a novel of madness, is ultimately triumphantly American, crazy yet victorious—a gooey lunacy.

Cabot Wright Begins, on the other hand, is perhaps the most repulsive and unredeemed representation of the republic I have yet read. Purdy seems almost to leap out of his American skin just describing it: this is the country's murk and sinew; it is a peeled-back scab of a novel. Purdy inverts everything to giddy effect—Rapists become desirable, housewives insatiable, and husbands schlemeils who prefer to spoon Congolese businessmen than face their oversexed wives. A character is described as being indentured into 'white slavery' by his novelist aspirations. It would seem that only a manic deadpan prevails in this neu-America, until Cabot Wright, serial rapist, in the final pages, discovers how to laugh.

[Alex Sarll]

I first encountered James Purdy by way of a recent Guardian piece headlined "'I'm not a gay writer, I'm a monster': how James Purdy outraged America". And the notion of this outlandish cult figure, his ashes buried next to Edith Sitwell, was irresistible. Where to start on his work? Well, obviously with the book which started his trajectory to outcast status, the one which “was condescendingly reviewed by the pew-warmers of the local think tanks. [It] was not about a rapist but about people that try to write a book about a rapist. It’s about writing. Nearly everybody missed that". And with a sex attacker in the Oval Office and a new celebrity wrong'un unmasked most weeks, the notion of an unseemly scuffle to put out the first biography of a convicted (but rapidly released) mass rapist, one so handsome and of such a good family that of course he got away with hundreds of crimes before finally and reluctantly being imprisoned, felt painfully timely.

Alas, it's a bit of a stinker.

You know how, to return to the Guardian, they have a regular author interviewette feature in which one of the questions is always 'Which book by someone else do you wish you'd written?' Most express artistic envy of a particular tome; none that I recall have ever made the obvious reply, and namechecked something short and dumb but incredibly lucrative. A few, though, have the sense to point out that the question doesn't work, each book being the expression of the particular writer who gave it life. Normally I'd agree, but Cabot Wright Begins makes me doubt that. It feels like a book which Roth or especially Donleavy would have written much, much better. It would still have been problematic as all get-out, obviously, but it would at least have sung with that popping sense of vitality they could both so reliably manifest. This, though...it feels rote, in its offences and its timeworn satires alike. Yes, the account of Cabot Wright's crimes is mostly a book within the book, that much is obvious – though unlike a similar but much more successful jab at the publishing pressures behind vicious trash, Percival Everett's Erasure, the differences between Purdy's own style and that of the writer he's mocking are barely perceptible. And in general, even considered as a satire of the way writers get that little bit too fascinated with their subjects, however unwholesome, and of the publishing industry's bottom-feeding, it's all very familiar stuff. Even half a century ago, I feel as if all that would have been novel was the sheer rudeness, and while there's the odd line which lands - "his thin-blooded prose appeared once every seven years in The New Yorker, cut a bit, with more commas than he had put in, but it was unmistakably his voice" – well, Purdy's own work is still not so very far from the stuff he's describing, and the more he lays into his contemporaries, even ones I don't particularly like, the more I think, well, who the Hell are you to talk? A missed opportunity which I only finished because, unlike the supposedly great books it's about, it is at least short.

[Matteo Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Cabot Wright ci riprova" di James Purdy, una volta di più, consente di individuare nello scrittore americano un vero e proprio genio letterario. Se l'espediente narrativo è la "trasformazione" di Cabot Wright da uomo d'affari di Wall Street a stupratore seriale, ciò di cui Purdy ci vuole parlare è tuttavia ben più profondo. Se si fosse infatti limitato a raccontare una storia che si fosse racchiusa nella parabola di cui sopra, Purdy avrebbe dato semplicemente sfogo a un divertissement, certo serio per il crimine di cui si macchia Cabot Wright, ma, tutto sommato, "giocoso" nel suo sviluppo, e in fin dei conti tristemente sterile.
Ma l'opera di Purdy, come scrivevo più sopra, nasconde - forse neanche troppo velatamente - un grido di insopportabile fastidio, acuti e ficcanti strali, critiche aspre ammantate d'intelligente ironia e preziosa satira nei confronti di una società - quella americana - in balia di messaggi, propugnati dai mass media - la televisione in primis, ritiene Purdy -, che non fanno altro se non anestetizzare l'astante e ingozzarlo di non-verità, come la gloriosa e stancamente trita idea del "sogno americano". E così, 24 su 24, 7 giorni su 7, il «dio della televisione», «questa levatrice che nutre i bambini e gli adulti con una lingua morta, false dottrine, messaggi nascosti e spesso lascivi, proponendo come modello una vita senz'anima», che non dice mai la verità, «ogniqualvolta sia possibile raccontare una bugia», concretizza quanto lo showman P. T. Barnum diceva del suo pubblico: "Ogni minuto che passa, c'è un nuovo babbeo che si aggiunge al gruppo!".
«Quando siamo fortunati, finiamo per essere anestetizzati davanti al piccolo schermo», afferma Purdy nella sua interessante nota al fondo del libro dal titolo "Cabot trent'anni dopo". «Se non lo siamo», aggiunge, «veniamo circuiti e costretti ad acquistare prodotti o «idee» che, nocivi o ingannevoli, sono molto più pericolosi delle tentazioni dell'Essere dal piede fesso, il Diavolo in persona».
Ebbene, allora che cosa fare di fronte a questa situazione che pare senza via d'uscita? Provocatoriamente, rimane forse solo la via intrapresa da Cabot Wright, per comprendere la quale dovrete però leggere il libro...
Come scrive infine Purdy: «In un mondo dove «tutto è permesso», perché non vi è più nulla da desiderare, forse questi Americani [come Cabot Wright!] potranno, un giorno, indicarci una possibilità di vita. Forse saranno proprio loro a salvare tutti noi dall'Apocalisse».

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considered by some to be one of the greatest post-war American novels. As with many of Purdy's novels, it concerns itself with the act of writing itself and how reality is fabricated in the novel. Cabot Wright the central character is a serial rapist newly released from prison.The book concerns an attempt to make a best selling novel from his story. To 'write the truth like fiction' as one of the characters says.

In one crucial scene Cabot Wright describes his unfurnished room unfurnished room. 'I have you see four or five wallpapers, one under the other. They wear down gradually all of them to the original willow pattern over the calcimine itself, then robin readbreast, scenes at the forge, water lilies, peasents in ancient France.' In a way Cabot Wrights identity like the wallpaper is a series of identities imprinted on him by society. But stripped away you end up with a blank.

It is difficult to love the characters in this book, no one is particularly likable. But that's not the point. This is a book about identity. At times it reminded me of Desolation Row by Bob Dylan (also written in 1965). For instance this scene:

'Everywhere he saw those engaged in race-track betting, gambling and other realated pursuits, professional cat and dog walkers, disappointed unpublished authors, longshoremen unhired or laid off for some reasons, plain clothesmen resting until their suspected turned up, photographers, reported hoping to run into stories, worried businessmen out to think things through, senile Spaniards who still discussed Franco, young men in Bermuda shorts, the crippled ministers of churches getting ideas, social workers "out in the field", shoe clerks out for a smoke, nursemaids, homemakers, cooks, and children not at camp.'

Not sure whether this book is still in print, but worth checking the second-hand bookshops for. HA!

[A M-F · Rating 5 out of 5]

What
The hell. This book had no business being as good as it was. 30 years before the scream franchise made meta cool we have a book within a book within a book critiquing bourgeois society, the publishing industry, heterosexuality, writers who don't write, the fetishization of black bodies by white people, the moral vacancy of the rich and the power (and powerlessness) of rape.

Fun fact James purdy was born just outside fort Wayne Indiana in the unironically named Hicksville, Ohio. Despite being raised in Northwest Ohio myself, i never learned about him in school and was shocked to find out he was local.

[Mike Gardiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present.”

First great novel of the year.

An under-appreciated masterpiece of satire from an under-appreciated American master.

Despite the lurid synopsis you may read— this is sensitive as it is sharp. The prose is exquisite. I zoomed through.

A tremendous comic indictment of culture, true crime, and “sex”, even sprinkling in psychiatry, race, economics, and art to round out the skewering.

[Djrmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was Purdy's first full length novel to be published, and a lot of the themes that would be examined in greater detail in later books are jammed into this story about the people involved in getting a book about a convicted rapist published. It's Purdy's characters that keep this from being a total wallow in cynicism - they're the extremes of humanity.

[EMM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book by James Purdy that I did not fully enjoy reading. Getting through this one was kind of an ordeal. I was asking when this mess was going to end. In terms of pace, it’s less of a crazy ride. The first part of the book especially seems like Purdy at half speed. Would it be wrong of me to say that for the first 6 chapters I was waiting for this novel to begin? When it finally does begin, it's in the form of a book within a book. In part, this section takes on the blurring of fact and fiction with fiction overtaking fact and both obliterating and creating identity.
And what unhinged specimen has Purdy given us now? Why look, it's a gentle rapist. Even with such a preposterous rapist, practically defanged, it's still disturbing to read about his crimes. The borderline misogyny in Purdy’s writing doesn’t help. Take Purdy's usual level of misogyny raise it a notch or two, multiply it by the greater number of female characters (most of them Cabot Wright's victims), add to that a rapist as the main character, and you are going to end up with something pretty damn unpleasant. Descriptions of the rapes are suggestive rather than graphic, usually brief but still chilling.
Sometimes it seemed like the book was made up of mind numbing conversations interspersed with rapes. I think I prefer it when Purdy tortures his characters not the reader. It's almost like his main message to the reader is “You saw the synopsis, and you still chose to pick up this book, choke on it, bitch.” The novel drags especially during Cabot Wright’s conversations with his elderly boss, Mr. Warburton. Cabot being informed about the death of his parents by his boss is the exception, and I think it shows what Purdy was aiming for with these conversations. But only this one hit the mark for me. It's a hoot while also being unsettling as Cabot is just hitting his stride as a rapist. There are also Mr. Warburton’s mostly racist and homophobic rants. By labeling his lengthy diatribes sermons, Purdy is at least up front that we are not in for fun reading.
There is always a question of how to take Purdy’s writing since it's so over the top. At times it seems like Purdy's aim is to shock, and at other times I thought he couldn't help but be shocking. This book, more than any of his others, allows the reader to dismiss all the craziness as satire. Its weakness as a satire is that Purdy doesn't have a light touch at the best of times, and here rather than the sharpness of good satire, you have more of a bludgeoning effect.
Though it’s tempting to dismiss the more disturbing aspects of the novel as satire, this is James Purdy, and Cabot Wright is only a step or two removed from a number of his other characters who don't have the excuse of clear cut satire for their behavior. I would say that Cabot Wright as a character and his behavior are not a function of satire; rather the satire is built around him. Cabot is very much a James Purdy character like others who are slaves to lust and more than likely to express their extreme desires with violence. He is the novel’s hero. And yes that's how he seems due to Purdy's approach and maybe even his intent. Though Purdy does tip his hat to the more conventional view that rapists are bad people, Cabot Wright is his man, and he is rooting for him. While everyone else is trod underfoot, the rapist is exalted. And I don’t see much significance in the abuse he suffers. That's par for the course for Purdy characters. Many of them get far worse with less reason.
The satirical element comes alive near the end of the book on the subject of publishing. It references Cabot Wright Begins and Purdy's kind of writing in general. I am not a fan of writers striking at critics and airing petty personal or professional grievances within the pages of their books. My usual stance is "You're on the clock. Settle your grudges on your own time." At least we get a complete list of exactly who shit in James Purdy's cereal. Though in part it seems self-indulgent, it’s also surprisingly effective. It earns its place because here the book turns on itself creating an ouroboros effect. I kind of wish the book had ended there. This section, among other things, underscores the "lighten up, it's only satirical rape" message of the book.
To want to read this book, you have to be pretty far out there or a James Purdy fan. The gay content in this book is very slight, only a tiny bit at the end almost like Purdy is throwing us a bone. Cabot Wright Begins is uneven and unlike other James Purdy books, it seems overlong. Though the book has value, I can’t imagine ever recommending it to anyone.

[Allison Ziegler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another gorgeous Purdy book that really pulls you into these stinky little rooms. A little bit sillier than I expected this time! Even with the super dark subject matter, it seems like he had a little fun with it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The back half of this book is the funniest Purdy I'd ever read, hands-down. This is clearly hard to expect from such a demented plot that is so loaded with always-topical hot-button topics like the bleak literary landscape, white male privilege both on Wall Street and in the bedroom, a certain paternalistic relationship a rich elderly white woman has with her black servants, the anger-mongering contraption we call a television, and much, much more. It's not a particularly gay book by Purdy standards, or even a queer one; it's his most straightforward one in terms of being the most plausible but also the most directly savage. Lots of characters mythologize about the bile that is the American landscape, and many simply wander off the deep end like it's the most natural thing in the world. There are moments that are shockingly pulled off in their darkly comic lunacy: for example, how would a mother and daughter handle being sexually preyed upon by one Cabot Wright, especially considering that one is an older actress brutally forcing fate to make her daughter just as famous, if not more so. There's so much material here that it makes innumerable small points within a larger satirical arc. I love how quickly and efficiently Wright chronicles a Wall Street executive's status anxiety and how quickly it transmogrifies into an apocalyptic vision for America rife with bigotry, moral panic, and an almost erotic fetishization of ensuing filth. Its take on crackpot doctors is alarmingly fresh (still) even if the novel was released in 1964. The characters' musings on race look an awful lot like Purdy's read his fair share of Baldwin. It's an amusing novel for the first half - totally weird, likable, haunting yet charming - and then it soars from the halfway point on. The style Purdy employs when the eponymous Cabot Wright laughs instead of giggling is a Joycean parody of Beatnik nonsense that is nothing short of masterful. I wish the the build-up to the second half had been as much of a romp as the second half, but the payoff is so great. There's even pamphlets about forcing deviants to marry mentioned in here, and yes, I'm looking at you, Mike Pence.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should have stuck with Bernie

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dial just anywhere at present, call up California or London or Nice and say, 'I hadn't a minute to pick up the inkwell. How are you?' Half-listen to this and that, and goodbye again. So miraculous and yet so unsatisfying, so spooky-unreal to hear people's live voices when you know you'll never see them alive again if you both live to be 200. It's already like talking to the River Styx."

"Where's the keenest place you can hurt a man? Not in his eye or groin, but where he can't remember."

"By George, the passage of time is one thing that can frighten a fellow into running right out of here, without his hat, down to the river, if he let it."

Mrs. Bickle had arrived in New York during the big drought, the revival of the wig and white-lead lip makeup, fellatio as the favorite subject in best-selling fiction, the campaign by the Commissioner of Markets to put palm-readers, fortune-tellers, and purveyors of the occult out of business, and world sugar irregular.

[Nick Eilts · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story of a serial rapist... well, hardly. It's the story of getting the story of a semi-amnesiac, Svengali rapist who has repressed or misplaced the details. There's a host of character/narrators, all hopelessly flawed, who walk us through seedy, NYC hotels, through Wall Street, and even through the affluent suburbs of Chicago. To be honest, the pacing of the book was tedious and, in the end, there wasn't much reward for my attention.

[Jennifer creelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow. there are sentences strung together in this novel that Martin Amis would kill to have written. Not since London Fields have I been so joyfully confused. A bunch of unlikable characters including a rapist, a publisher, a writer, and a used car salesman.... and the rapist is most endearing. A book every American should read but most likely can't get through.(less)

[Daniel Polansky]

A cuckold and his friend’s wife set out to write the biography of a famous Manhattan rapist, in what feels like American Psycho fifty years before American Psycho. It didn’t quite work for me. It’s audacious and savage but unfocused, with too many targets of abuse for any specific critique to gather much momentum. It was mean but kinda muddled.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my 5 favorite novels of all time. Equal parts Flannery O'Connor, Roald Dahl, and John Waters. Hilarious, dark satire of midcentury American culture, of publishing, of sexual mores -- of everything. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

[Tammy Downing · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really care for this book about a man, who encouraged by his wife, goes to New York to write the story of a serial rapist. Parts of it were very interesting but it was very confusing at time.

[Matt Walker]

Of all the comic novels about serial rapists I've read, this is one of the better ones.

[Lyle]

Page 179
“The great thing about the American consumer is that it is filled before it is ever empty, glutted without knowing the feeling of either hunger or satiety, the organs of America so easily manipulated and ready for any surgical, plastic, or other adjustment the Master Masturbator may believe ready. Thus faggots are in charge of sexual makeup for women and men, stimulating the gonads of baseball players, prizefighters, captains of industry, farmers, and small-town grocery clerks saving up to become drag-queens on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street, to say nothing of decreeing that women shall resemble lead pencils without a hole for refills.”

“The true sexual orgasm in America takes place today in the popcorn bag in the movie theater on your right, before a baseball game on TV while chewing 80 percent fat hamburgers.

“Pleasure died 40 years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief in everything and everybody, tolerance for the intolerable, the hatred of being alone in silence for more than 20 seconds, the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks, with speeded-up peristalsis while talking to a crowd of fifteen trillion other same-bodies eating sandwiches, gassing cokes, peristalsing, and talking, while baseball-sound-movie-TV tomorrow’s trots off-track betting howled roared farted choked gagged exploded reentered atmo honked bawled deafened pawed puked croaked shouted repeated repeated REPEATED, especiallySAY IT AGAIN LOUDER SAY IT AGAIN, stick that product in every God-damned American’s mouth and make him say
I BOUGHT IT, GOD, I BOUGHT IT AND IT’S GREAT IT’
S HOLLYWOOD IT’S MY ASS GOING UP AND DOWN AGAIN, IT’S USA, GOD, and if you can’t get it in his mouth and make him swear it swear it usa, stick it in his anal sphincter (look it up in the dictionary, college graduates, on account of you didn’t have time to learn it in the College of Your Choice).”

Page 217
“But I won’t, pet,” she said in a low voice to herself and him. “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present.”

[David Curry · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Purdy (1914-2009) is an American writer who briefly skirted critical acclaim, then fell into neglect, and eventually became known, if at all, as a “writer’s writer” With Purdy, the moniker might even be “weird writer’s writer.” On the whole, he has enjoyed better success in England than in America, although a number of notable American writers, most recently Jonathan Franzen, have championed his work and tried to gain for him a larger, more permanent audience.

His 1964 novel CANOT WRIGHT BEGINS, in which the title character is a serial rapist, was originally published by Fsrrar Straus & Giroux and has been reissued by Liveright. It starts out well enough, with the sort of opera buffa flair that is more perfectly sustained in novels such as his 1984 ON GLORY’S COURSE, but about halfway through Purdy begins to seem sloppy and uncertain about what he wants to do, There are wonderful Purdy touches, as when a character “forces a yawn” or when another character is described as a “wheelbarrow repairman,” but there aren’t enough of these to overcome the general murk — although the minute I say that, I have to acknowledge that “general murk” may be a Purdy theme, if in fact he has a theme.


Still, after half a century of reading Purdy, I always turn to him expecting delight, puzzlement and laughter. This is not the first time I’ve been disappointed, but never disappointed enough to give up on him.

[Pete · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is a satire, and a bomb-throwing, so i'm not going to criticize it for being crass or problematic -- it's actually not even that problematic, it's just in world-historical bad taste to have rape serve as a running throwaway gag. not the kind of book that has any interest in trauma so i won't waste brain cells on that part other than to say, bad looks abound here.

somewhere between nathanael west and terry southern but not as good as that sounds, or not as realized as it could be. author is working a lot of different satiric beats here and i found most of them stale. but when purdy finds his stride mocking the moral panic and insecurity of rich people, it sings. wasn't enough of that to make this a good book, and long chunks of it are frankly bad, but i will try another purdy before too long.

fun fact i impulse bought this book in 2013 and only read it now

[Nora Vasilescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Multilayered, elaborate satire. From the exceptional handling of the cultural quote to the absurdly theatrically constructed dialogues. From the extricate combination of clichee-istic characters to the big structure of a novel in a novel in a novel including even their own critique.
N.B. It”s not anti-political correctness unless you’re a neo-neo-protestant blue-nose. Read Brukner&Houllebecq for that.

[Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purdy winds up runs to home base and hits it out of the park and straight into your skull. He draws you in like one of Cabot’s victims and in the end you’ll be thanking him for it. He really starts to ratchet it up by the end. Unfortunately a still relevant book but when he spits this man SPITS.

Very glad I purchased his short story collection, extremely excited to dive in.