Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Brophy, Brigid (Antonia) - Dan Wickenden

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DAN WICKENDEN

Beyond the haunting title of Brigid Brophy's second novel lies a tale as strange and original as the one she told three years ago in "Hackenfeller's Ape." Like that small, remarkable book, "The King of a Rainy Country" is youthful, glittering, a little perverse; and it is written in the same immaculate prose.

The narrator, Susan, is a nineteen-year-old Londoner who takes a job as secretary to one Finkelheim (born Gilchrist), a dealer in publishers' remainders and pornography; and who in a manner of speaking shares a dingy flat with a youth named Neale. Susan and Neale are a pair of romantics, self-conscious, precious, intermittently exasperating; but they are, after all, very young, and Miss Brophy manages to make them touching as well.

What plot there is has to do with their search for a former schoolmate…. [The] book becomes for a time a kind of comic travelogue. The sad and curious climax is reached in Venice, which Miss Brophy...

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1. Introduction
2. The Times Literary Supplement
3. Gene Baro
4. Pearl Kazin
5. Dan Wickenden
6. Charles J. Rolo
7. Maurice Richardson
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Joseph L. Quinn
10. Martin Tucker
11. Eve Auchincloss
12. Naomi Bliven
13. The Times Literary Supplement
14. Anthony Burgess
15. Victor Strauss
16. Anthony Burgess
17. Alan Levensohn
18. Edward Weeks
19. Joyce Carol Oates
20. Time
21. Hermione Lee
22. Alan Hollinghurst
23. Marilyn Butler
24. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates