cover image Out with the Stars

Out with the Stars

James Purdy, Gregory Crewdson. Peter Owen Publishers, $30 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-7206-0861-8

Purdy's trademark blend of high camp, bizarre characters, outrageous satire and piercing realism animates this offbeat romp. Over-the-hill composer Abner Blossom resolves to write an opera based on the lives of Cyril Vane, bisexual risque photographer of Harlem blacks, and his harpy Russian-born wife Olga Petrovna, a faded silent-screen star who claims to be a relative of the Romanovs. This odd couple, determined to suppress the truth about their lives, attempt to squelch Blossom's opera, Cock Crow , whose Brooklyn premiere climaxes a narrative that involves a scandalous funeral with hired mourners, a sleepwalker's suicide, a swarthy Sicilian youth who levitates and several gay love affairs. The colorful cast here includes Kentucky-born songwriter Val Sturgis, who is Blossom's obsequious protege, and former screen idol Francis X. Beauregard, who fills his 40-room mansion with servile young men. While Purdy ( Mourners Below ) satirizes avant-garde artiness and America's obsession with celebrities, he displays affectionate sympathy for his comic characters. (Sept.)