American Skin

by Peter Viertel

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395346479
• ISBN13: 9780395346471
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Skillful and Dark Entertainment

Viertel's skill exhibited here recalls Orson Welles' old cliche: "I will sell no wine before its time." In his seventies after a lifetime in the film industry and some well made novels, he delivers a smooth, perfectly lucid and nicely colored text. It is certainly a contender to stand as one of the best and most subtle of his interesting shelf of novels. Superficially concerning an aging American satyr at large on the Riveria, this book is really a searing black comedy worthy of Flaubert, a disturbing confession of certain unresolved and anarchic tendancies just below the surface of commonly shared American assumptions about personal liberty, personal space, and especially sex as both an entitlement and a reason for living in itself. The book is also perfectly constructed and clever as high grade detective fiction, appearing to be one kind of book and then another, then perhaps another, always gripping and funny and sadly true, but holding back its deepest resonances until the very last paragraphs. Viertel has the advantages of being one of the few writers personally schooled, both in the art of writing and the art of living, by Papa Hemingway, a story he has elsewhere told. Some of his books, such as Love Lies Bleeding, are both conscious tribute and conscious counter-point to that mentoring. For awhile in the reading, American Skin appears to be in the same vein -- a return to the turf of The Sun Also Rises, The Garden of Eden, and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night -- only now late in the 20th century. Yet finally, in the fullness of his years, Viertel comes fully into his own and looks over this territory as only an old man who has now lived longer than any of them could see it. The plot's climactic unwinding packs the wallup of an old rogue bull escaped from the ring, full of menace and outrageous truth. The reader is shocked by the simultaneity of feeling the pain of the protagonist's manly addiction, and at the same time objectively observing the appalling consequences of what he has allowed himself to connive at. The text at this critical point has all the low key easy wit of silent comedy. As Hemingway taught, the grandest and most difficult effects are only the simplest, and it takes a lifetime to learn that. This book is "Exhibet A" to that dictum. American Skin is a negected and virtually unknown masterpiece of recent American literature.