Of Hobbled Unicorns

I'm off to the outlet malls! I'm taking the bus to meet up with my friend Evan and his mom for pancake breakfast then we're hitting the shops. What am I reading on the ride, you ask? Why, False Entry by Hortense Calisher, one of my faves. It's her first novel and I had never read it before.



One thing that bothers me about first novels is how the authors are trying to spit out every clever phrase they've ever thought of in their lives, as if this might well be their only work. Dear Hortense may not have been an exception in 1961, but that doesn't make me adore her any less. Here's the opening line:

Truth. In these days of so many trials by association, where a man A can show, with an infinity of fine brush strokes, how he once was an intimate of the man B, and the man B assert, with what only God might see to be craft of virtue, that he never knew the man A, I see truth as an old, hobbled unicorn limping through the forest of allegation and denial, pausing here and there to try to warm itself at some sun-foil of proof that shines for a moment through the trees.

And now off to buy all the Saucony's!