Fade Out

by Woolf, Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780876859889
• ISBN10: 0876859880
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-03-01
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr

Summary

Fade Out is, in the words of the Village Voice, the "comic masterpiece of one of contemporary America's long-neglected geniuses." First published in 1959, it is a stunning, surreal criticism of American life in the materialistic, youth-and money-crazed 1950s. Its hero is Dick Twombley, a 74-year old retired bank clerk who struggles to retain what remains of his dignity in a world that regards old age as an embarrassment. When he is mistakenly accused of kidnapping two little girls he has befriended, Dick's daughter packs him off to a suburban New York City retirement home. He soon makes his escape with the help of a fellow inmate, and together the two "fugitives from injustice" embark on a cross-country odyssey that lands them in the abandoned hotel of an Arizona ghost town.It's the end of the road, but it's also a new home, and a place of idiosyncratic spiritual rebirth. As Robert Creeley said, "It is [Dick's] sincere acceptance of what he's been given, his fascination with what he can make of it," that allows him to accept deprivation as happiness, without irony or satire. "Woolf's hero is a [kind of] Don Quixote, who even when defeated still hears the echoes of his transforming dreams."