In the mid-1950s, just about every title from Beacon was listed as “First Award Winner” whatever that was. Here, again, we have a cover that has little to do with the text — from this cover, and the title, we’re lead to believe this may be a steamy farm or backwoods tale, when the novel is far, far from that. It is another quirky offering from Willeford about identity, fraud, and lost dreams.
The narrator is a middle-aged man in Columbus, Ohio, who works as an accountant at a milk company and is married to a dull wife. In quiet secret, he wrote a novel called No Bed Too High and sold it to the second publisher he mailed it to. He got a $250 advance and publication in hardcover, but the novel did not do too well or make him famous.
Still, it’s a way out of this droll life, and the novel encourages him to dream of a new life, and against his wife’s desire, they move to Florida where he tries to write a second novel but nothing is there.
He wants out of this life of failure too. he feels like a hel for letting his wife down. He sees an small item in the morning paper about a monestary in Orangeville that will close down due to money matters. he thinks there might be a magazine article in this, so he takes the train, only buying a one way ticket, already knowing in his heart he won’t return to his wife and their life.
He discovers that the monestary is run by a con man who has re-defined his life, much like Jay Gatsby. The narrator sees that he can do, so he joins the outfit and becomes a monk, and later a Reverend, going ouit top do God’s work.
He, a white man of the cloth, is sent to Harlem. Looking at the cover art again, is the dark-skinned woman not tanned or Mexican but supposed to be black?
Like Willeford’s other first-person sociopaths that feel no remorse in their deceptions and lies, , this one plays at being righteous, leads prayers when he does not believe in God, and marries teenagers whom he has made feel guilty for their sinful sex out of wedlock. He has eschewed his two previous failures of a life, and now has this…but his past, and the life he abandoned, have a way of finding him.
In some ways, this novel is akin to the absurdity of Albert Camus, and the narrator likes to reflect on Kafka and Russian tragedies in comparison to his life. Here, again, is a book that could have been categorized as awork of literary merit, at the time, rather than a cheap paperback with a cover and title that does not fit the fine words on the pages.
Honey Gal isn’t as good as Pick-Up or The Woman Chaser, no, but we highly recommend it and if you have never read Willeford, now is a good time.
Horizontal Woman/The Social Worker by Barry Malzberg (Leisure Books, 1972; 197
Posted in Barry N. Malzberg, pulp fiction, Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks with tags absurdism, existential angst, Lesire Books, sex book, socia work, social commentary, welfare fiction on November 22, 2009 by vintagesleazepaperbacksThis dark and comic “sex” novel was published in 1972 by Leisure as Horizontal Woman and reissued in 1977 as The Social Worker, probably the more absurd of the two titles.
After grauating college and working on selling his writing, Barry N. Malzberg worked for about a year as a social worker in the New York City Welfare Department, covering Brooklyn. Most likely he hated it, caught in the dull insanity of the government system. He did get a few books and stories out of it, notably The Day of the Burning, a novel that seems to be about alien invasion and world destruction but is about the collapse of one man’s mind and perhaps the welfare system itself.
In Horizontal Woman/The Social Worker, we meet Elizabeth Moore, who decides to use her body to soothe and comfort her clients, as she goes from door to door, updating her caseload. What? you say: This is a porn novel? Softcore? Sex? Sleaze?
Yes and no. It’s a Barry Malzberg sex novel, which means the sex is not, well, erotic, but it is dirty and slimey. This is not exactly a left-hander; it’s a combination of the absurd rompings of a female a la Terry Southern’s Candy and the existential angst of Kafka and Camus…
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