NEWSDAY NY REVIEW OF THE BILGE BY LEE OLDS
“The Bilge” is a short, gloomy, seductive allegory that expresses the despair that men and women of good will sometimes feel when pondering the world of greed, exploitation, oppression and hopelessness that confronts them. Archetypal characters – Richter, the narrator, a reactionary lawyer, rigid, bitter, anti-Semitic; Peters, the Bohemian writer whose lifestyle eats at the foundations of Richter’s beliefs; the Professor, the iconoclastic Jewish intellectual Richter envies and abominates; the Goddess, the Professor’s beautiful, dependent, destructive, drunk wife – argue incessantly in an unearthly Sausalito, as graphically corporeal as the character’s habitation but strangely undescribe. Through murder and mayhem, we never escape the bitter confines of Richter’s mind. “The Bilge,” philosophical fiction of a sort rarely attempted by Americans, though depressing in its conclusions, is exhilarating in its execution. Newsday, NY
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