The Practical Heart: Four Novellas
Allan Gurganus documents the daily dreams that sustain us. In the title  novella of his extraordinary new collection,The Practical Heart, the  narrator tells how his Aunt Muriel, a dour, genteel-poor Scottish immigrant,  came to be painted by John Singer Sargent. This bit of family history turns out  to be a fiction of the narrator's making, invented in an attempt to express how  grand his auntmighthave been, given an entirely different life. The  other novellas likewise give us narrators interpreting and inventing the people  around them. In "Preservation News" a woman eulogizes a historical  preservationist who taught her the language of architecture; in "He's One, Too,"  a gay man looks back on his 1950s youth, when a stolid neighbor was arrested for  indecent exposure in a public lavatory; in "Saint Monster," a son mourns his  homely, good-hearted father, giving us parent-love as perhaps the most ordinary  fantasy of all.--Claire Dederer--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.