Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Where is the movie?Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The love story is a delight, the social commentary sharp, the writing funny and fun-and yet the sorrow, even bitterness, at the core of this book about our perfidious species is inescapable and profound. The plot unfolds brilliantly and heartbreakingly from there. I have suffered so much already.” His name is Larry, he loves avocados, he is a tireless and attentive lover-and Fred is home so little, he doesn’t even notice that Dorothy's amphibian boyfriend is living in their guest room. Then, the very evening after she hears a radio report of a monster who has killed two people and escaped from the facility where he was being held, her screen door opens and a 6-foot-7-inch creature, with the bulging forehead and flat nose of a frog and the body of an attractively hunky man, shoulders his way in and stares straight into her face. Dorothy has one great friend, Estelle, who draws out “other people’s subversive instincts,” offering sherry and laughter to break up the long afternoons, but it’s not enough. After the death of their young son, followed by a miscarriage, her despair, his affair, and, finally, the running-over of their Jack Russell terrier, this marriage is more of a house-sharing arrangement than any comfort to anyone. He will be late, he says, not even troubling to come up with an excuse for why. We meet the very dear character Dorothy Caliban at home, sending her husband, Fred, off to work.

Caliban was originally published in 1982 to raves that compared it to works by Edgar Allan Poe, David Lynch, Richard Yates, and Angela Carter, not to mention E.T., King Kong, and “Beauty and the Beast”-which only shows how sui generis it really is. Thanks to the support of writers like Daniel Handler and Rivka Galchen, who introduces this novella, the marvelous Ingalls ( Three Masquerades, 2017, etc.) has been rescued from obscurity with reissues of her books. A lonely housewife gets a new lease on life in the strong, green arms of a sea monster.

Rachel ingalls books