The narrator's mother, a dreamy, drug-addicted recluse the lawyer, Mr. Do you turn the spade over the living heart?'') as well as the terrible (''Who can help me but God Himself Who has already failed and is not?'').

Miss MacIntosh, the central figure, a bald headed governess, solid as rock though smashed to pieces inside, stuffed with odd bits of useless knowledge, blighted remembrances she invokes the ordinary (''The life is what counts. Can one call it an ''extended metaphor''- the narrator representing Illusion haunted by Reality? Or is Miss Young's theme simply the irreality of life? The characters are large, luminous, bizarre, troubling. It is a hybrid work: a poetic novel which is also somewhat homey, overwhelmingly symbolic yet lyrical, incantatory but also humorous, rather grotesquely so.

Miss Young's nominal method is stream of consciousness in her hands, however, it becomes a veritable sea, a floating palimpsest, polyphonic, impressionistic. Something of Virginia Woolf and Carson McCullers and Elinor Wylie is here, and something, too, of Jamesian psychology, Joycean puns, Proustian longueurs. Almost twenty years in the making, and one thousand and one hundred and ninety-eight pages long- twice the size of Dog Years, no less. After that she tried to hang herself, but it is my understanding that she is still alive.You cannot argue away Miss MacIntosh, My Darling: it's just there, like Mount Everest. And they were all in jail, sheriff and old wife and girl. The sheriff thought she was too beautiful to hang. “Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. “However, she was never hanged,” the hangman said. She was occupying a jail cell furnished with satin hangings and a German music box with a horn and a Yale pennant. When the hangman saw her, she had let down her hair. She was nineteen years old and dressed like a man with her hair pulled up under her cap – probably the salesman never knew that it was a woman who killed him. When he had said that he was the father of little children, she had laughed harder than ever. When he had begged for mercy, she had laughed, playing with her gun. It was duck-hunting season, she said, and that she had shot him for pleasure, the way you shoot a red-billed duck on the wing. She had never seen him before and had no grudge against him.

In a water-flooded rice field at sunset, she had murdered a travelling salesman.

Miss macintosh my darling