new writing: the princess of 72nd street (elaine kraf, 1979)
at the washington post
At the Washington Post, I have a review of Modern Library’s new edition of Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street. I feel like it is a pretty exemplary version of the type of book that it is and every time I write some version of that statement it sounds like a put down but it’s not I swear:
It’s no insult to Kraf’s novel to say that if one were to imagine a perfect specimen of a “forgotten classic” by a woman writer from the 1960s and ’70s, you might come up with “The Princess of 72nd Street.” Like Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Woman Destroyed” or Iris Owens’s “After Claude,” it’s a slender, accomplished and frequently funny work told from the perspective of a lively and bruised female consciousness. Like those books, it focuses primarily on the narrator’s inner life rather than on external eve…