She had been in her brief existence two distinctly different beings, and one of these was the creature she was before and the other the creature she had become after reading the works of Marcel Proust. No, but really; she wasn’t joking. From this experience she’d emerged with all manner of extensions, reinforcements, renewals of her entire nervous system—indeed she might say that she’d been endowed with a perfectly new apparatus for apprehending the vibrations of other people’s souls. She was saying this most awkwardly, she knew, but she often wondered if we sufficiently realized the effect that Proust had had upon our awareness of one another, for whether we liked it or not, we were forced to take about with us wherever we went this extraordinary apparatus, recording accurately a thousand little matters of which we had not formerly been aware…

Isabel Bolton is, hands down, one of The Greats; however, she’s been horrifically buried, neglected, and all but forgotten. Bolton’s the direct descendent of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and in the same textual genealogy as Elizabeth Bowen and Kay Boyle.

Her descriptions in this collection of short novels—of interior lives amid the clamor of an ever-changing world, in the glare of Manhattan’s myriad streetlights and social scenes, and of the very real horrors of aging and becoming more aware that the world (the city) will go on without you—are so incredibly incisive and heart-rending to read, to cherish, to admire.



Do your part in unburying Bolton if the modernist lineage above is your cuppa. ( )