A Triumphant Original

I equate Wrinkles with other originals: Winesburg, Ohio, In Our Time, and Evan Connell Jr.’s Mrs. Bridge. Simmons has invented a form, a biography of a man told 44 times (each chapter three or four pages long), beginning in boyhood, moving through childhood, on to middle age and projected old age. I have never read anything like it. Wrinkles has far more humor and concreteness than Sherwood Anderson, more believability, vulnerability, and real sexuality than Hemingway. Yet it has things in common with both of them: crystalline prose, sharp compression, a strong tactile sense, and, most importantly, a new and probably unduplicable prose form.

Simmons wrote an earlier comic delight, Powdered Eggs, which was the angry young artist’s book. Wrinkles is about what its title implies: physical aging and loss, and the growing moral ambiguity of middle age. When he was young, “Often he carried a book with him. At its most powerful the right book he felt would save him from death or see him through death without panic or despair. His favorites were small editions of Herrick, Catullus, Lucretius, and Antony and Cleopatra.” Later: “Although he travels with personal equipment—pen, keys, wallet— nothing material has saving significance for him now. Soon he will feel that the quality of immutability, which once attracted him to certain objects, is worthless…. Less and less will he think of people as good or bad; rather it will seem to him that benefactors look good to the beneficiaries, injurers bad to the injured, and that the rest is taste.”

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David Evanier

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I equate Wrinkles with other originals: Winesburg, Ohio, In Our Time, and Evan Connell Jr.’s Mrs. Bridge. Simmons has invented a form, a biography of a man told 44 times (each chapter three or four pages long), beginning in boyhood, moving through childhood, on to middle age and projected old age. I have never read anything like it. Wrinkles has far more humor and concreteness than Sherwood Anderson, more believability, vulnerability, and real sexuality than Hemingway. Yet it has things in common with both of them: crystalline prose, sharp compression, a strong tactile sense, and, most importantly, a new and probably unduplicable prose form.

Simmons wrote an earlier comic delight, Powdered Eggs, which was the angry young artist’s book. Wrinkles is about what its title implies: physical aging and loss, and the growing moral ambiguity of middle age. When he was young, “Often he carried a book with him. At its most powerful the right book he felt would save him from death or see him through death without panic or despair. His favorites were small editions of Herrick, Catullus, Lucretius, and Antony and Cleopatra.” Later: “Although he travels with personal equipment—pen, keys, wallet— nothing material has saving significance for him now. Soon he will feel that the quality of immutability, which once attracted him to certain objects, is worthless…. Less and less will he think of people as good or bad; rather it will seem to him that benefactors look good to the beneficiaries, injurers bad to the injured, and that the rest is taste.”