Daisy's Necklace, and What Came of It

A young man named Mortimer has locked himself away to write the great American novel, but the world keeps intruding. Through his window he watches the neighborhood: Daisy Snarle and her family, the mysterious friend Barescythe, and young Bell, who carries a quiet longing for an absent father. Aldrich's slim, strange literary episode plays gentle tricks on the reader - is this a novel being written, or a memory being recalled? The text oscillates between the absurdity of artistic ambition and genuine tenderness, between the pomposity of literary aspiration and the clear-eyed view from that window. Written when Aldrich was just twenty, it reads like a young man's love letter to the act of making stories and an equally young man's grief for the fathers who leave. It endures because it captures something true about the distance between the lives we live and the books we long to write.