?A brightly macabre farce that hurtles from West to East Village like a Mack Sennett with corpses? (Martin Levin, The New York Times Book Review), from the author of Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes
It
is the 1960s, and Oliver?the young, Black, intellectually precocious,
sexually ambivalent, Gertrude Stein-loving narrator of Henry Van Dyke's Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes?has
fulfilled his dreams and settled in New York City. Not just anywhere in
New York City, either, but at the fabled Chelsea Hotel, home to
bohemians and burnouts, actual and aspirational.
Here,
Oliver becomes caught in the feud between two elderly prima donnas
living out the very long hangover of the Jazz Age. There is the
littérateur Max Rhode, based on Carl Van Vechten, the author and
photographer famous for documenting the Harlem Renaissance; and Orson
Valentine, based on Virgil Thomson, the composer who collaborated with
Stein on the opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Both
of these diminished titans knew Gertrude personally; both were members
of her coterie; and both now seek to enlist Oliver as protégé and pawn
in their struggle over an off-Broadway production of a Stein play. As
Oliver attempts to come to grips with his own identity and ambitions,
the machinations of his two surrogate fathers come to embroil the entire
Hotel.
As Rachel Cohen writes in her
foreword to this edition, ?The drama Van Dyke writes . . . is at once as
classical as something from Racine and as nearby as that of any
sprawling family gathering over Granny's will . . . [His] novels are
about the families one is born into, and the ones one seems to be born
for.? Available again for the first time since its 1968 debut, Blood of Strawberries runs merry rings around the queer, multiracial origins of modernity with style to spare.
