Archangel House

Archangel House exercises a kind of fascination through the intensity, the luxuriance of its sentimentality. It is the history of a love affair between a young writer (male) and a young musician (female), but, what I mean, a love affair! The lovers swoon, they faint, they talk poetry, and make love to music; they have stars in their hair and the moon for a mantle. And at last the Archangel musician dies. It is an incredibly unreal book. The conversations between male characters are too sweet for words, those between the lovers are mostly prose poems. The tone is purplish throughout. But its intensity is genuine. One yields, with some reluctance, to the repeated and feverish attacks of its minor poetry.