America, My Wilderness.

New York, NY Farrar Straus Giroux, 1972. Hardcover First Ed; First Printing, so stated. First Ed;ition First Printing, so stated. Near Fine in Near Fine DJ: Both book and DJ show only minute indications of use. Book shows a bit of buckling at the head of the backstrip; else flawless; binding square and secure; text clean. DJ shows only very mild rubbing; else flawless; price unclipped; mylar-protected. Overall, very close to 'As New'. NOT a Remainder. NOT a Book-Club Edition. NOT an Ex-Library copy. 8vo. 252pp. Dust jacket design by Diane and Leo Dillon. Tinted Top Edge. His 16th book. Hardback with DJ. Frederic Prokosch is the author I would most wish to save from what Gore Vidal has called "time's winged wastebasket." Born in 1908, his career extended from the early 1930's to the 1980's. He combines an extraordinary talent for description and a lush romantic prose style that never crosses the line into being purple with a modern -- nearly existential -- sensibility. One might think the two would conflict, but remarkably they don't. Prokosch invests scenes of near-total bleakness with stunning beauty, and describes scenes of the most intense beauty with a sometimes disturbing detachment. His gift for language surpasses any American of his era except Fitzgerald (and they are neck and neck), but the quality of his thought is clearer. Fitzgerald learned his style from Keats, but Prokosch seems by temperament much more capable of the negative capability Keats extolled. The influence of Prokosch, who was perhaps more widely read in Europe than in the U.S. (his home country), can be found in magical realism (Garcia-Marquez, Bowles) and in the current generation of European authors (Rushdie, Kundera, etc.). America, My Wilderness is a picaresque novel of a homeless wanderer in America. Perhaps it is the stoic aspects of eastern philosophy and religion that drew him, for the sensibility in his novels is very nearly Buddhist in its overall detachment while remaining Romantic in its particulars. Whatever it was, the world he has imagined will likely strike you so powerfully that you will choose to return more than once.