![]() ![]() ![]() But one night, after a big winter vodka party at the Trouvenskoys (with Allan and Greg in attendance), the diamond is found missing from the safe in the library: ""the past stolen from them, one final time,"" with the shock bringing on Alexei's soon-fatal heart attack. ![]() Circa 1950 Alexei and Naida-who immediately fascinate Allan-live in a run-down mansion by railroad tracks near the Hudson they're as Americanized as possible Alexei tries to make a living with stilted historical novels despite virtual poverty, they've held onto one piece of the past that's an insurance policy for the future-a royal diamond worth $100,000. (Virtually every Wilder work is given an obvious fictional parallel Reeves delivers mini-lectures on writing, with references to his friends ""Gertrude,"" ""Bunny,"" et al.) Considerably more interesting, however, is what Allan recalls of his handsome college roommate Greg Trouvenskoy-the son of Russian ÉmigrÉs Alexei and Princess Naida, a cousin of the deposed Czar Nicholas. Nearly half of this reminiscing is a rather fulsome tribute to the fledgling writer's mentor back then: world-famous novelist/playwright Reeves Lock, hart, who is modeled, with laborious transparency, on Thornton Wilder. ![]() Allan Prieston, one of Knowles' most passive alter-egos, is a Knowles-like novelist who returns to Yale in 1980 to give a lecture-and spends most of his time there recalling the events of his undergraduate days in the early Fifties. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |