July 13

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott (The Noonday Press 1990, orig. 1940)

This is my second reading of this short novel, given to me by my friend, the late Douglas LePan, who saw it as a book worthy of note. It’s a concise tale of two American expats in France in the 1920s, on a summer afternoon when a peripatetic and self-absorbed Irish couple, the Cullens, drop in and leave abruptly. The woman, Madeleine, carries a falcon everywhere with her, to the dismay of her drunken husband. The hawk becomes a prism through which the characters view the world and each other, as well as a metaphor for love that embraces captivity versus freedom, and the various appetites said to inform the need to be free versus the need to stay captive. The writing is graceful and delicate, but largely unmoving, largely because none of these characters is particularly admirable or even likable. Wescott has been called a low-rent Fitzgerald by detractors, while others have compared him favourably to Katherine Anne Porter.