Neither, as it happens, had any of the dozen people I’ve mentioned it to in the months since. “A deft and funny creation of a high quality,” the critic wrote, “somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters.” I had never heard of The Young Visiters. Going through it again this spring, I was caught by a review from Commonweal quoted on the back cover. I’ve read it many times I can’t get enough of it. Because of this insight, it doesn’t read like an adult imitating children-and it is incredibly funny. Alfred and Guinevere is the best novel I’ve ever read about childhood, because it accurately depicts the way children brilliantly and hilariously mimic adults, the way that children’s conversations are imperfectly observed imitations of adult conversations. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere’s diary.
It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler’s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere.
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