John Thompson was part of the vibrant postmodern New York literary scene
of the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies. That scene was famously
fueled by love, liquor, food and parties, but most of all by ideas, by
words, serious and witty, spoken and written. Thompson's only novel,
never published in his lifetime, tells the poignant yet humorous tale of
a young boy in the Middle West in the 1920s. Each of the six chapters is
written in a different voice, creating a powerful literary mosaic of a
boy's experience of tragic loss. In the author's words, the stories in
this semi-autobiographical novel, "design no more but to give a few
glimpses of how some things used to be a long time ago, fictitious
things, when the curtain of forgetfulness was falling as it must over
our childhood."