The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Process by Kay Boyle. Ed. and intro. Sandra Spanier
Jason D. Fichtel

Kay Boyle. Process. Ed. and intro. Sandra Spanier. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001. 139 pp. $24.95.

Originally written in 1924 and 1925 and lost when sent to potential publishers in New York, Process has finally been published in an excellent edition and with a superb introduction by Spanier. Boyle’s novel, a classic bildungsroman, takes its place alongside the other important coming-of-age stories of her contemporaries. In Process we find a main character sharing many of the same qualities and conditions as those found in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, McAlmon’s Village, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Lewis’s Main Street, or Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. Kerith Day, a young woman living in Cincinnati, is acutely aware of the limitations of her surroundings, and she longs to find something more. Unlike many of the stories mentioned above, Kerith receives the support of her mother in her quest to flee Cincinnati. She tells Kerith, "I don’t want you wasted here with them and what they can offer you. I want you away from here. I don’t want little things absorbing you. . . . " Instead of those "little things," Kerith puts her energies into art and politics and emerges as a highly intelligent, observant woman. Her relationship with Soupault, a young French student, eventually leads to her epiphany and to her escape from Ohio to France, where she can fully engage with art, politics, and self. This novel is important for what it shows about Boyle’s writing and how she adopts and adapts modernist language and techniques. While most of Boyle’s work remains out of print, Process is a novel that deserves and demands a place in the modernist canon. Hopefully this novel will spur other attempts to see Boyle’s work remain in print, for hers is a voice we must hear along with those authors already well-established in American modernism. [Jason D. Fichtel]