Reading Coleman Dowell's "Island People"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Metafiction
9 min read
The article extensively discusses Island People's metafictional techniques, comparing it to Calvino's work and describing its self-referential structure where stories generate from within themselves. Understanding metafiction as a literary device would deepen appreciation of Dowell's experimental approach.
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New Directions Publishing
13 min read
The article mentions New Directions as the publisher of Dowell's more experimental works in the 1970s. This legendary independent publisher has a rich history of championing avant-garde and modernist literature that contextualizes Dowell's place in American literary history.
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If on a winter's night a traveler
11 min read
Calvino's novel is directly compared to Island People multiple times in the article as a touchstone for understanding Dowell's narrative techniques. Readers unfamiliar with this postmodern classic would benefit from understanding the comparison being drawn.
The piece below from Christopher Sorrentino (Sound on Sound, Trance, Now Beacon, Now Sea, and the fascinating Substack, Scarcely Human) first appeared in CONTEXT No. 3, way back in spring 2000. This was one hell of an issue, with features on Manuel Puig and Nathalie Sarraute (by Suzanne Jill Levine and John Taylor, respectively), an essay by Richard Powers that I alluded to on the most recent episode of the Two Month Review (“Being and Seeming: The Technology of Representation”), Part II of Curtis White’s “Requiem for a Dead White Male,” and excerpts from Melville, Rabelais, Alexander Pope, and Claude Debussy.
But it’s Coleman Dowell’s novels that I really want to focus on today.
I do have interesting Dalkey lore related to Coleman Dowell, mostly related to his long-term partner, Bert Slaff, but I’m going to save this for a future post on Eugene Hayworth’s Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (which contains an introduction from Edmund White). For now, I’ll just mention that Bert was on Dalkey’s board until the end of his life, is responsible for the “Coleman Dowell Series,” which was one of Dalkey’s only named & funded series, and hosted many a Dalkey employee who visited NYC. (Bert’s apartment on 5th Ave. with a balcony overlooking the Guggenheim was both spectacular and awash in stories in a way that felt almost haunted, positively, by Coleman’s spirit.)
Rather than distract from Dowell’s work with gossip and namedropping, I would rather you read Sorrentino’s piece, and then check out Island People and/or Too Much Flesh and Jabez. (Spoiler: By contrast with the more “plotless” Island People, Too Much Flesh and Jabez is much easier to summarize.)
According to the “About the Author” page in Island People:
...Coleman Dowell was born in 1925 in Adairville, Kentucky. After serving in the army, he left Kentucky for New York and a career on Broadway and in television. He began writing fiction in the early sixties; Random House published his first novel, One of the Children Is Crying, in 1968. As he continued writing, Dowell’s books became more daring and experimental, and appropriately were published by New Directions: Mrs. October Was Here appeared in 1974, Island People in 1976, and Too Much Flesh and Jabez in 1977. Dowell’s final novel, White on Black on White, was published by
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.