I might have been unfairly tough with Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Henry Holt & Company, 2008, 693 pp.). Charles McGrath wrote a very engaging review in the New York Times this week: "James Clan, A Family With a Load of Baggage."
Mr. McGrath, a former editor of the NYT Book Review, also reviews this week, in the newspaper Sunday literary supplement, Miranda Seymour's memoir of her highly eccentric father (Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House, Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 270 pp.). George Seymour was a British eccentric as we like them even when they are not likable. His greatest love was Thrumpton Hall, the family manor house in Nottinghamshire. He married, had children, then, in middle age, started riding bikes in leather suites with young men from humble extraction. He finally settled with a late-life companion, an illiterate long-haired young man he had picked up outside a movie theater.
Joe Morris is also an eccentric, albeit from the other side of the Atlantic. At 80, after the death of his wife, he started dating again under his son's supervision. The latter, Bob Morris, who had to deal "with his own problems as a middle-aged, love-handled single man in the youth-obsessed Manhattan gay dating scene," has published a memoir on this unusual experience, Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating With My Dad (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 288 pp.). His book is reviewed in the same issue of the Book Review.
2008.08.03
