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    A Gay and Melancholy Sound
    A Gay and Melancholy Sound
    A Gay and Melancholy Sound
    Audiobook21 hours

    A Gay and Melancholy Sound

    Written by Merle Miller and Nancy Pearl

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The first book in nationally renowned librarian Nancy Pearl’s new Book Lust Rediscoveries series, this lost literary classic is available for the first time in decades. As funny and entertaining as it is captivating and heartrending, A Gay and Melancholy Sound is a shattering depiction of modern disconnection and the tragic consequences of a life bereft of love.

    Joshua Bland has lived the kind of life many would define as extraordinary. Born in a small Iowa town to a controlling, delusional mother who had always wanted a daughter rather than a son, her anger at him colors his life. His father, a compassionate drinker incapable of dealing with Joshua’s mother, walks out on his wife and son, leaving a vacuum in the family that is damagingly filled by his tutor-cum-stepfather Petrarch Pavan, scion of a wealthy New York family who has secrets of his own. Playing on Joshua’s brilliance, Petrarch trains him to win a nationwide knowledge competition, but Joshua’s disappointing results in the finals are met with anger and disbelief by both his mother and stepfather. If Petrarch was unsuccessful in teaching Joshua the information he needed to win the contest, he had more success in instilling Joshua with the cynicism, self-doubt, and self-hatred that fill his own soul.

    Enlisting in the army during World War II, he serves first as an infantryman, where his irreverent letters home turn him into a best-selling author. Then, as a paratrooper, he meets the physical challenges he thought were beyond his reach and helps free the concentration camps before being wounded as the Allied forces free Buchenwald. Back home after the war, he becomes a wildly successful producer—and all of this by the age of thirty-seven. But when his production company flounders amid critical and financial woes, the reality of who he is becomes perfectly, depressingly clear: he has had a lifetime of extraordinary experiences—and no emotional connection to any of it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 3, 2012
    ISBN9781455886081
    A Gay and Melancholy Sound
    Author

    Merle Miller

    Merle Miller was born on May 17, 1919 in Montour, Iowa, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. He joined the US. Army Air Corps during World War II, where he worked as an editor of Yank. His best-known books are his biographies of three presidents: Plain Speaking: An Oral History of Harry Truman, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, and Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. His novels include That Winter, The Sure Thing, Reunion, A Secret Understanding, A Gay and Melancholy Sound, What Happened, Island 49, and A Day in Late September. He also wrote We Dropped the A-Bomb, The Judges and the Judged, Only You, Dick Daring!, about his experiences writing a television pilot for CBS starring Barbara Stanwyck and Jackie Cooper, and “On Being Different,” an expansion of his 1971 article for the The New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” He died in 1986.

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    Reviews for A Gay and Melancholy Sound

    3.5/5

    20 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book breaks your heart as the emotionally-crippled main character commits suicide as you watch, so to speak, while taking you on a tour of the many low points of his life. Yet i still found it laugh-out-loud funny on many occasions, because even as joshua manages to ruin everything good he ever has in his life, he is also bitingly, blackly sardonic about the many unappealing characters he comes across, from his mother onwards.
    • 4/5
      How to describe A Gay and Melancholy Sound? It is easy to dislike Joshua Bland. As a child genius his life has been the antithesis of his name. His mother always strove for fame and recognition through her son to the point of mental abuse. His father abandoned the situation, leaving Josh to be raised by a hostile and unhappy stepfather. When Josh crumbles under the demands and suffers his first major disappointment it sends his future into a tailspin of apathy and low expectation. He goes on to become a World War II veteran, a bestselling author and a successful producer without any accomplishment touching his life in any meaningful way. He is so disconnected from his feelings that he decides it's time to commit suicide. Before he does he needs to write his memoirs as one last gift to the world from the prodigy who used to have lofty aspirations.
    • 3/5
      In Merele's door-stopper of a social-commentary novel, the well-named Joshua Bland is our protagonist, and the book is framed as his tape recorded account of his life prior to his suicide. Bland is a character who might be identified today as suffering from a mild form of Asperger's. He is, indeed, bland, but he his also brilliant, a former child prodigy, and WW II hero, and theatrical producer. It is, one would think, a life that would make for interesting reading, particularly given Bland's acerbic wit. However, it felt flat to me, and overlong (at 523 pages). Nothing is left out, or at least it felt like nothing was left out. And Bland likes few people, and loves none, or so it seems. He is a creature of maladies, both psychological and sociological. His mother is narcissistic and distant, his step-father a con man, his first wife a clawing social climber and dreadful mother . . . and so on. They are all, of course, metaphors for the inane hollowness of modern American life and while Bland can tell the nasty from the nice, he thwarts every effort by others to love him, being incapable of the emotion himself, and manages to push everyone away, including his second wife, whom he believes to be his last chance at a fulfilling life -- hence the intention to commit suicide. Merle's writing is clever and full of wit and he does a fine job at revealing the hollow core of the American dream -- but because the central character was so locked-down emotionally, although I felt pity for him, I never truly cared about him, and that ultimately was too large a flaw for the book to be totally satisfying, no matter how smart it was.