Hind's Kidnap - by Joseph McElroy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man's obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife's voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind's Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.

Review Quotes

"Hind's Kidnap is a view of a sunken cathedral. A thoroughly cogent, marvelous, intricate, even awesome structure, the cathedral in Hind's Kidnap is encountered like a fish coming upon Chartres in the ocean depths." -- Walker Percy

"A novel which is in many ways an unusual and distinguished work of the imagination." -- J. G. Farrell, The Spectator, London

"It is full of marvels.... All is code in Hind's Kidnap; and deciphered, it's dazzling." -- John Leonard, The New York Times

"The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result is an often funny, painfully intense psychological detective story filled with Double-Crostics, Nabokovian word games and revelations that tantalizingly obscure as much as they reveal....It requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed. Along the way, it is often difficult to see de Forrest for the trees--even with, or from, what McElroy calls "Hind's height."" -- Time, "Present Imperfect"