The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Suspended Sentences Albert J. Gerard
Irving Malin

Albert J. Gerard. Suspended Sentences. John Daniel and Company, 1998. 135 pp. Paper: $12.00.

I have admired Gerard’s fiction for many years; I reviewed Christine/Annette and The Hotel in the Jungle in this periodical. I am pleased that this excellent collection of short stories is now available.
The dates of publication for the six stories range from 1933 (when Gerard was eighteen) to 1993; the stories appeared in Hound and Horn, Story, The Magazine (a short-lived periodical which contained work by Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and Caroline Gordon—one of the advisors was Yvor Winters). Although the stories are set in Davos, New York City, Mazatlán, and other “exotic” places, they share the obsessive concern with perverse marriage, of attraction and repulsion, and a “taste for risk” (to use one of the titles). They forcefully explore the “heart of darkness” we find in those writers Gerard has discussed in his criticism: Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, and Dostoyevsky.
Perhaps the two best stories are “Miss Prindle’s Lover” and “The Incubus.” They are dark meditations on the sickness of love (or vice versa); they give us tangled motives, Gothic shudders. The protagonists try to be “safe” but they find that they are bewitched. The women they love are sinister—even if they don’t mean to be—and they overwhelm innocent, structured lives. Gerard recognizes that in the affairs there is a complicated bond of lover and beloved, victim and victimizer—a bond which is expressed in wonderful language.
Look closely at this passage: “Miss Prindle had stopped speaking, and now, as I stood by the window, I felt utterly alone. A friendly voice had ceased, and the room was filled with foreign sounds. I thought of her as an insane and disgusting woman.” The clarity of the style heightens the nightmarish affair—and makes us question the narrator’s vision. Isn’t he disgusting in his rush to judgment? Isn’t he “foreign”? And once we question his sentences, we are compelled to suspend quick evaluation.
Gerard is an admirable writer because he gives us this “life of nerves.” And he implicates us; he makes us secret sharers. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Suspended Sentences Albert J. Gerard Irving Malin Albert J. Gerard. Suspended Sentences. John Daniel and Company, 1998. 135 pp. Paper: $12.00. I have admired Gerard’s fiction for many years; I reviewed Christine/Annette and The Hotel in the Jungle in this periodical. I am pleased that this excellent collection of short stories is now available. The dates of publication for the six stories range from 1933 (when Gerard was eighteen) to 1993; the stories appeared in Hound and Horn, Story, The Magazine (a short-lived periodical which contained work by Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and Caroline Gordon—one of the advisors was Yvor Winters). Although the stories are set in Davos, New York City, Mazatlán, and other “exotic” places, they share the obsessive concern with perverse marriage, of attraction and repulsion, and a “taste for risk” (to use one of the titles). They forcefully explore the “heart of darkness” we find in those writers Gerard has discussed in his criticism: Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps the two best stories are “Miss Prindle’s Lover” and “The Incubus.” They are dark meditations on the sickness of love (or vice versa); they give us tangled motives, Gothic shudders. The protagonists try to be “safe” but they find that they are bewitched. The women they love are sinister—even if they don’t mean to be—and they overwhelm innocent, structured lives. Gerard recognizes that in the affairs there is a complicated bond of lover and beloved, victim and victimizer—a bond which is expressed in wonderful language. Look closely at this passage: “Miss Prindle had stopped speaking, and now, as I stood by the window, I felt utterly alone. A friendly voice had ceased, and the room was filled with foreign sounds. I thought of her as an insane and disgusting woman.” The clarity of the style heightens the nightmarish affair—and makes us question the narrator’s vision. Isn’t he disgusting in his rush to judgment? Isn’t he “foreign”? And once we question his sentences, we are compelled to suspend quick evaluation. Gerard is an admirable writer because he gives us this “life of nerves.” And he implicates us; he makes us secret sharers. [Irving Malin]

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