FIRST PERSONS. A Novel

New York: Harper & Row, 1973. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a very good plus jacket. The first person is the narrator who appears throughout, guiding the reader with one hand while throwing sand in his eyes with the other, since all of this is full of contrivances and connivances and interpolations designed to show that what one invents or experiences is perhaps the same thing. Author Wright is an English professor and so is timid Ralph Hathorne Burr who may or may not be the narrator after he becomes the "protagonist of a novel about murder." In fact, hypothecating here, deviating there, one is left wondering about the murder itself -- is it that of the old woman whom at first he stones, with fossils, in a wood -- Burnet Woods of course -- or a man who is killed at the same site or perhaps even his wife Cynthia, whom he permitted to die of her own hand? Other things do happen -- he becomes involved with a young woman half his age who fulfills his "sectsual needs" and then impels him to confess to a crime which of course she doesn't believe in -- and he has an almost fatal heart attack -- and, and, and, by the close you may find yourself lost in Burnet Woods with some of these mystifications. Wright also takes his chances with asides, or questions, "which might tend to alienate the novel's readers. . . rather than evoking the kind of compassionate sympathy you no doubt would prefer." Particularly with as prim a professorial type as Ralph Hathorne Burr.