The God of Nightmares

by Paula Fox, Rosellen Brown (Introduction)

Overview

"Vividly rendered…haunting…[Paula Fox] writes with silken ease and a sensitivity to nuance." —Newsday

In 1941, twenty-three-year-old Helen Bynum leaves home for the first time and sets out from rural New York to find her Aunt Lulu, an aging actress in New Orleans. There she finds a life of passion and adventure, possibilities and choices. Falling in with a bohemian group of intellectuals, she discovers romance and sex, friendship and risk, her world mirrored by the steamy mystery of the French Quarter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393322873
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Paula Fox (1923—2017) was the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books.

Rosellen Brown is the author of the best-selling novel Before and After as well as Half a Heart, Civil Wars, and others. She lives in Chicago.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

April 22, 1923

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

"Fox manages to avoid sentimentality…And that is at the heart of Fox's accomplishment in this novel about difficult romance: the eschewal of sentimentality and illusion in favor of real sentiment."

Washington Post

"Wonderfully rich."

New York Times Book Review

"For me, [Fox] has been an indispensable guide, for the perfection of her language and the sternness of her gaze. Anyone who owns a complete set of the reissued novels possesses a literary and moral treasure."

Rosellen Brown

"A novel cast from the senses. The characters love and die in the watery warm light of New Orleans, in a language of pleasure that takes its ethos from that city's status in the American imagination as the capital of sensuality."

Washington Times

"Lyrically written and elegantly crafted…Fox brilliantly the fierce attentiveness and openness, bafflement, embarrassment and self-consciousness, as well as the wonder and joy of naive youth."

San Francisco Chronicle

[Fox] knows how to pace a story, how to use the richest language to portray the barest of scenes. And she knows how to create a character.

Vogue

One of America's best novelists.

Shirley Hazzard

Haunting, lyrical....A coming-of-age outing stamped with a mastery that less mature writers can only hope to eventually achieve.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One of our most intelligent...contemporary novelists.

Nation

Vividly rendered...haunting.

Newsday

Fox's prose flows as clearly and gracefully as clear water in a stream--but there is a dark current underneath: ``the implacable forces of time and loss.'' From a hardscrabble existence with her relentlessly cheerful mother in rural upstate New York, narrator Helen Bynum goes to New Orleans in search of her aunt, a former Ziegfeld girl and has-been actress. Aunt Lulu proves to be an irascible alcoholic, but Helen stays on in the warm-scented, langorous city, so different from the gray, frozen atmosphere of Poughkeepsie. Here Helen feels free for the first time to pursue the potentials of her own life. Enveloped in the affection of her new friends--her landlord, a poet, and his mistress; a seductive young man with silver hair who is the son of a rabbi and with whom she falls in love; another woman from the North who becomes her best friend; an elegant homosexual of Creole descent--Helen at first feels safe and contented. But as she gradually becomes aware of the imminence of WW II in Europe, the injustice of race relations in the South and the dark secrets in her friends' lives, she is suffused with apprehension about ``the black wall of death'' that seems to loom everywhere. In a poignant chapter set years later, Helen finally realizes the implications of those long-ago events. Fox ( A Servant's Tale ) is a highly gifted writer whose insightful novels resonate with subtle truths. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly