The Double View: A Novel

Chandler Brossard

June 2015 · Open Road Media

About this eBook

From the author of Who Walk in Darkness and The Bold Saboteurs, a wild and wickedly funny tale of madness, lust, and murder in midcentury New York

In a posh mental institution upstate, Carter bides his time between electroshock treatments, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. A longtime alcoholic, he is desperate to get better but feels worse every day—perhaps because he suspects that his wife and best friend are having an affair back home in Manhattan.
 
The truth, however, is that Carter has no clue how depraved his friends have become. Nymphomaniacs, adulterers, killers, and thieves, they have succumbed to every temptation, no matter how grotesque. If Carter knew what the intelligentsia of New York was really up to, he would never want to leave his padded room.
 
A dark satire of urbane sophistication and a chilling exposé of the thin veneer that masks the madness within us all, The Double View is a brilliant provocation from one of America’s most revolutionary authors.

About the author

Chandler Brossard (1922–1993) was an American novelist, editor, playwright, and poet. Born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, he grew up in Washington, DC, where he left school at an early age and educated himself by reading the literary classics. At eighteen, he was hired by the Washington Post as a copy boy. He became a reporter and moved to New York City, where he wrote for the New Yorker and held senior editorial positions at Time, Coronet, the American Mercury, and Look magazine. Encouraged to write fiction by the New Yorker editor William Shawn, Brossard published his debut novel, Who Walk in Darkness, in 1952. Set in contemporary Greenwich Village, it is considered by many to be the first Beat novel, although Brossard rejected that categorization. Over the course of a forty-year career, he wrote or edited seventeen books, including the groundbreaking novels The Bold Saboteurs (1953) and The Double View (1960), and taught at numerous universities in the United States and abroad, among them SUNY College at Old Westbury on Long Island, the University of Birmingham in England, the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Schiller International University in Paris.