A Long Desire by Evan S. Connell

EVAN S. CONNELL, whose collection of historical essays, A Long Desire, has been re-released by The North Point Press, belongs to that curious group of authors whose work is both respected and ignored. In a recent profile of Evan S. Connell in the journal Ploughshares, Gerald Shapiro describes a career of hard work, praise, and obscurity. During the past thirty years Connell has written good books, over ten of them —six novels, three collections of short fiction, and two volumes of poetry—and they were well reviewed. But his career never reached commercial critical mass, and by the nineteen sixties, Connell, then in his forties, was no longer able to support himself with his writing, and he took a job with the California State Unemployment office. Connell achieved commercial and critical success in 1959 with his first novel, Mrs. Bridge, a semi-autobiographical portrait of an afflu ent, mid-western matron. Mrs. Bridge is a masterful work of realism, a midwestern Madame Bovary, with the detached irony and dreamlike clarity of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time. In Mrs. Bridge, Connell begins to explore what will prove to be a lifelong preoccupation with authenticity—of how our desire to become something more than we are, something real, takes us a half-step out of life into the willy-nilly dream worlds his characters inhabit. His 1966 novel, The Diary of a Rapist, is one of the best of these portraits, and its protagonist, Earl Summerfield, has been compared with Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. But The Diary of a Rapist doesn’t have the seduction of Crime and Punishment. Earl Summerfield’s misogyny is