A short piece I wrote for The Scofield's second issue's "Ports of Call" section, an issue themed around Kay Boyle's work: http://bit.ly/TheScofield1-2

Written during the latter part of the Second World War and published in 1944, Boyle’s Avalanche represents a critical shift in her writing; while still demonstrating a stylistic debt to modernist figures such as Henry James, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, Avalanche sees Boyle pressing forward into more overtly political work—a thematic that will color her work to come, especially with the advent of the Vietnam War. In many ways, while she is one of American expatriate literature’s most unique prose stylists, one that is sadly forgotten and whose reputation is horrifically buried in literary culture today, she is also the twentieth century’s most vocal chronicler of war, covering and spanning every war’s repercussions for America, the world at large, and those individuals poised precariously between borders and nations.

In Avalanche, the American Fenton Ravel travels to war-torn France in order to find her lost lover, Bastineau, who has put his knowledge of mountaineering and the frontiers to good use in assisting French nationals to escape from Germany across the Alps. In what is perhaps Boyle’s most brilliant and cinematic opening chapter—demonstrating a debt to James as well as to Alfred Hitchcock—Fenton travels in a blacked-out train with two men whose faces she can see only by the light of a paltry match used to light proffered cigarettes. On the journey, Fenton tries to decipher their nationalities based on their accents, their opinions about world politics, their manners, and the way they interact with each other—launching one of the first extended interior monologue scenes in all of Boyle’s novels.

However, it becomes clear that in a world ruptured by war and in which no one feels wholly at home, national identity is a myth, at best.And this is the central predicament with which Fenton deals in Avalanche, on her quest to rejoin her lover Bastineau. Along the way, not only are patriotism and national allegiance called into question, but so are the ineffable yet persistent callings of the heart: as in all of Boyle’s work, Avalanche’s themes of love and espionage examine the dialectical relationship between these states, just as her characters play out a sociopolitical chamber drama in which the heart knows nothing about borders, and love knows no bounds of national or political allegiance. ( )

224. Avalanche a novel by Kay Boyle (read 27 Dec 1945) In the days when I read this book I kept a diary but it only had about an inch of space for the recording of the day's events. On the day I finished this book I learned that Pope Pius XII had created 32 new Cardinals--the first Cardinals he created in his pontificate. This was such exciting news to me that I did not mention this book. But I think I liked it well enough. ( )