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Table of Contents
About The Book
A lost midcentury classic—the farcical misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with two adoptive mothers, a lascivious cook, and a reticent ghost.
In a small Michigan town, in the late 1950s, the widow Etta Klein—wealthy and Jewish—has for more than thirty years relied for aid, comfort, and companionship on her Black housekeeper Harriet Gibbs. Between “Aunt Harry” and Etta, a relationship has developed that is closer than a friendship, yet not quite a marriage. They are inseparable, at once absurdly unequal and defined by a comic codependence.
Forever mourning the early death of her favorite son, Sargent, Etta has all but adopted Aunt Harry’s nephew, the precocious, gay seventeen-year-old Oliver, who has been raised by both women. Oliver is facing down his departure to college—and fending off the advances of Etta’s cook, Nella Mae—when the household is disrupted by the arrival of a self-proclaimed “warlock,” one Maurice LeFleur, who has convinced Etta and Harry that he might be able to contact Sargent in the afterlife . . .
Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was the debut of the extraordinary Henry Van Dyke, whose witty and outrageous novels look back to the sparkling, elaborate comedies of Ronald Firbank and forward to postmodern burlesques like Fran Ross’s Oreo. There is nothing else quite like them in American fiction.
In a small Michigan town, in the late 1950s, the widow Etta Klein—wealthy and Jewish—has for more than thirty years relied for aid, comfort, and companionship on her Black housekeeper Harriet Gibbs. Between “Aunt Harry” and Etta, a relationship has developed that is closer than a friendship, yet not quite a marriage. They are inseparable, at once absurdly unequal and defined by a comic codependence.
Forever mourning the early death of her favorite son, Sargent, Etta has all but adopted Aunt Harry’s nephew, the precocious, gay seventeen-year-old Oliver, who has been raised by both women. Oliver is facing down his departure to college—and fending off the advances of Etta’s cook, Nella Mae—when the household is disrupted by the arrival of a self-proclaimed “warlock,” one Maurice LeFleur, who has convinced Etta and Harry that he might be able to contact Sargent in the afterlife . . .
Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was the debut of the extraordinary Henry Van Dyke, whose witty and outrageous novels look back to the sparkling, elaborate comedies of Ronald Firbank and forward to postmodern burlesques like Fran Ross’s Oreo. There is nothing else quite like them in American fiction.
Product Details
- Publisher: McNally Editions (January 30, 2024)
- Length: 192 pages
- ISBN13: 9781946022882
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Raves and Reviews
"With brilliant comic writing and dialogue evocative of Capote, McCullers, and Waugh, Van Dyke’s delightfully unproblematized story of a Black queer youth’s coming-of-age feels decades ahead of its time."
– David Wight, Library Journal (starred review)
“His debt to Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams and other writers of the [light-decadent] style is perfectly obvious, yet the voice here is his own—amused, intelligent, slightly eccentric . . . A talented writer and a brave one.”
– Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times
“A charming and incisive, witty and entertaining book . . . Readers whose palates are not tolerant of the hardtack of mournful novels by college professors will welcome the taste of Mr. Van Dyke’s digestible and delicious confection . . . He has loads of talent.”
– James Purdy
“This captivating novel is constructed like a fantastic masque . . . scenes in the novel are ribald and hilarious, but the characters can also be pitiful or tragic . . . To give away the plot would be unfair to this strange and wonderful story. Enough to say that the catalyst is a self-termed warlock who has arrived to hold a séance. A first novel by a fine new original talent.”
– Jessie Kitching, Publishers Weekly
“First published in 1965, this is a blazingly witty, farcical book about the adventures of a Black gay teen and his de facto adoptive mothers in 1950s small town Michigan. Turmoil comes to the household in the form of a warlock (why not??) who insists he can psychically dig up answers about an old family tragedy. Audiences in 1965 didn’t exactly know what to do with Henry Van Dyke, a Black and openly gay author, who decided he didn't feel like writing the Serious Civil Rights Era novels they expected, and deftly sidestepped the expectation in favor of high camp.”
– Rachel S., Harvard Book Store
“Out of the stuff of improbability [Van Dyke] has fashioned a world of plausible high comedy . . . He has succeeded in infusing the seemingly absurd with a reality of its own, sparked by a style so artfully droll that it begs for reading aloud.”
– Patricia MacManus, Book Week
“One of the most unusual, most hopeful, and funniest novels to come out of the Civil Rights era. It is also unusually brave, for it is deeply autobiographical. The hero, Oliver, is clearly a Portrait of the Artist as a Gay Black Teen . . . The setting offers an idyll of inclusivity, where racial inequity and homophobia exist but are not crushing. In Green Acorns, Blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, mistresses and servants, are able to annoy, love, despise, and lust after each other as individuals . . . White readers were not used to finding Black characters treated with the same irreverence, neither more nor less, than whites. Nor, perhaps, were they ready to laugh with a Black gay man as the author and star of an effervescent, epigrammatic farce.”
– Erik Wood, from the Foreword
“Pure delight, it cuts back cleanly through race antagonisms, religious differences, superficial moralities and the other page-one causes to people themselves. There are tears, laughter and a marvelous streak of wackiness.”
– W. G. Rogers
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