Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel-a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young-s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters-and the nature of reality.

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who i