Double Vision: A Novel

by George Garrett

Overview

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time

A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver.

As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817381875
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	05/06/2011
Series:	Deep South Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	557 KB

About the Author

George Garrett is the author of 34 books. He has served as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and has been honored with many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Grant, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.

Table of Contents

BEGINNING ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN MIDDLE ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN SEVENTEEN EIGHTEEN NINETEEN TWENTY TWENTY-ONE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE ENDING TWENTY-FOUR TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-SIX TWENTY-SEVEN BEGIN AGAIN TWENTY-EIGHT POSTSCRIPT

Editorial Reviews

This novel—this creation—is perhaps the most radical of all Garrett’s experiments. It is fascinating, engaging, entertaining, funny and sorrowful by turns, wise, eloquent, graceful, and bawdy, too. It has, I believe, an element of the kind of mordant truth-facing of the Elizabethans in it—an almost valedictory tone, a summing up of experience, but couched in terms of this playful double-sided narrative—all of it contributing to the overall sense of the reader having stepped into an enthralling house of mirrors.”
—Richard Bausch, author of The Stories of Richard Bausch

“Structured according to the precepts in Aristotle’s Poetics (beginning, middle, end), Double Vision ought to be required reading for every MFA fiction student in the country. . . . [This book] shows us how the bits and pieces of a novel are patterned and ordered to reflect and refract, creating the wholeness and unity of a work of art, a closed and boundless universe. . . . Double Vision is masterful, the work of a writer at the height of his powers, a gem wrought by genius.”
—Kelly Cherry, author of My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers

 

“A poignant meditation on the literary life, on friendship and regret, on fame and obscurity, and on mortality itself. . . . What’s so remarkable about this is that, because of the clarity and candor of Mr. Garrett’s voice, because of the sureness of his hand, the book never once has the pompous deliberately intellectual feel of a postmodernist exercise. It does, however, feel exactly like the work of a prolific (34 books), if underappreciated, American writer working at the height of his powers.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Double Vision is formally the most innovative of Garrett's novels yet . . . exciting in its risk-taking and in the successful way in which those risks are mastered.”
—R. H. W. Dillard, author of Understanding George Garrett
 

“A brilliant novel! . . . George Garrett marshals a dazzling array of postmodernist tricks and devices to achieve a splendid and paradoxically old-fashioned directness of address in which he grapples with the most intimate and profound questions of life, art, and mortality. Double Vision is a wise and wonderful book.”
—David R. Slavitt, author of Re Verse: Essays of Poetry and Poets
 

From the Publisher