Cigarettes

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. As we have come to expect from a Harry Mathews novel, nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, but we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic pointed out, compare it to Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel—and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.

"This book is remarkable, as involving as a 19th-century saga and as original as any modernist invention—a rare combination of readability and ingenuity. In Cigarettes, Mathews has forged his most expressive style." (Edmund White)

"In Cigarettes, Mathews takes us more interestingly than ever into that unfinished work of art, the self, exposing powerful dependenci es and subtleties in a cast of characters distinct and poised yet half-groping toward others and themselves. The plot, the tale, the laying bare, are intriguingly stages and timed in a novel as imaginative as it is disturbing." (Joseph McElroy)

"Harry Mathews is the only American author I know whose utter originality does not erode his heart and his content. Cigarettes is odd, skillful, touching, wide, cultured, and engrossing." (Ned Rorem)

"Cigarettes has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination." (Gilbert Sorrentino)

"Cigarettes is a dazzling formal triumph that effortlessly charts the interlocking fates of fourteen pairs of relationshipsin early-1960s Greenwich village, in gleaming, fastidious prose." (New City 11-19-98)

"A brilliant and unsettling book. . . . Mathews weaves into each of his several story-threads more unexpected twists than you'll find in the average multi-volume Victorian noveal." (Tom Clark, Los Angeles Times 10-11-87)

"Like a clever gamester, Mathews teases the reader with plot twists and jokes as he subtly but seriously examines the nature of perception." (Booklist 10-1-87)