Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

A lost midcentury classic—the farcical misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with two adoptive mothers, a lascivious cook, and a reticent ghost.

In a small Michigan town, in the late 1950s, the widow Etta Klein—wealthy and Jewish—has for more than thirty years relied for aid, comfort, and companionship on her Black housekeeper Harriet Gibbs. Between “Aunt Harry” and Etta, a relationship has developed that is closer than a friendship, yet not quite a marriage. They are inseparable, at once absurdly unequal and defined by a comic codependence.

Forever mourning the early death of her favorite son, Sargent, Etta has all but adopted Aunt Harry’s nephew, the precocious, gay seventeen-year-old Oliver, who has been raised by both women. Oliver is facing down his departure to college—and fending off the advances of Etta’s cook, Nella Mae—when the household is disrupted by the arrival of a self-proclaimed “warlock,” one Maurice LeFleur, who has convinced Etta and Harry that he might be able to contact Sargent in the afterlife . . .

Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was the debut of the extraordinary Henry Van Dyke, whose witty and outrageous novels look back to the sparkling, elaborate comedies of Ronald Firbank and forward to postmodern burlesques like Fran Ross’s Oreo. There is nothing else quite like them in American fiction.

REVIEWS

"Urbane and nuanced . . . This powerful story articulates themes of racial and sexual identity, but has at its heart something arguably richer – an elegiac comic meditation on growing up, loss and death . . . The prose descriptions are lyrical, the dialogue is witty and caustic, and the poignant denouement is artfully contrived . . . Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes belongs as much with Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward as with Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.”― Times Literary Supplement

"With brilliant comic writing and dialogue evocative of Capote, McCullers, and Waugh, Van Dyke’s delightfully unproblematized story of a Black queer youth’s coming-of-age feels decades ahead of its time." ― Library Journal 

“His debt to Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams and other writers of the [light-decadent] style is perfectly obvious, yet the voice here is his own—amused, intelligent, slightly eccentric . . . A talented writer and a brave one.” ― New York Times

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: McNally Editions
ISBN: 978-1946022882
Pages: 192