INTIMACY TO HOSTILITY

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 17

INTIMACY TO HOSTILITY

One Last Glimpse. By Janies Aldridge, Michael Joseph. 182 pp. $9.75.

In “A Moveable Feast” Ernest Hemingway describes a car journey he made in 1929 from Lyons to Paris mcompany with Scott Fitzgerald. It gives a brief and one-sided account of an actual trip and of the friendship between these two disparate writers, a friendship which ended with Hemingway becoming increasingly hostile while Fitzgerald strove to maintain the relationship. “One Last Glimpse” also describes a car journey made by these two men but it is in the author’s words “pure fiction, not simulated fact.” James Aldridge has attempted to give his explanation of what he sees as the classical drama of this famous friendship and in doing so he has created a remarkable novel. The story is told by Kit, a young Australian newly-arrived in Europe, who is bulldozed and cajoled into accompanying the two writers on a trip from Paris to Fougeres; a trip with the stated objective of comparing Hugo’s “1793” with Balzac’s “Les Chouans,” and the unstated one of testing their friendship by days of intimacy. James Aldridge has written a very funny book which can be read enjoyably as pure entertainment, but underneath the wit and the occasional slapstick there is a worth-while

exploration of the characters of the two men and of the nature of their friendship. There is also a marvellous evocation of the glamour, the frenetic gaiety and the tensions of the expatriate Americans living in France at this time.

“One Last Glimpse” is a wellwritten and well-crafted novel. Its ending, though literally an accident, gives a sense of tragic

inevitability.—MAßGAßET QUIGLEY