SOURCE: "Glenway Wescott 1901-1987," in Diminishing Fictions: Essays on the Modern American Novel and Its Critics, Graywolf Press, 1987, pp.143-58.

In the following excerpt, Bawer touches on several themes in The Pilgrim Hawk, as well as the narrator's relationship to the author.

After his silence of the Thirties, Wescott produced two more long works of fiction, The Pilgrim Hawk ( 1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). The former, a novella, is perhaps his most nearly perfect work—taut, subtle, and exquisitely ordered. It takes place on a single afternoon in May of 1928 or 1929—the narrator, Alwyn Tower, can't quite remember which, since so many years have passed—in a house at Chancellet, outside of Paris, where he then lived with his "great friend Alexandra Henry," also known as Alex, who would later marry his brother. On that May afternoon some friends of Alex's, a rich, foolish Irish couple named Larry and...