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Tom Tryon’s First, ‘The Other,’ Is Real Gem
Denver Post, May 23rd, 1971
THERE IS A NEW STAR in the sky, Thomas Tryon, whose first novel is “The Other.”
Curiously, this effort is completely without the accepted flaws of an author’s first opus. It has non of the introspective, autobiographical soul searching that is a hallmark of most initial entries. Instead, “The Other” is a fascinating mixture of Henry James (“Turn of the Screw” for psychological, thrilling suspense), William Faulkner (“Absalom, Absalom” for baroque plotting and “Intruder in the Dust” for wisdom and an ear for truth found in the small-town milieu), Harper Lee (the dichotomous mind of children, at once innocent and sophisticated, as in “To Kill a Mockingbird”) and Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery” for horror honed and refined to the point where every ganglia is tingling). Good company, that crowd.
Thomas Tryon, a movie star best known for his performance as “The Cardinal” a handful of years ago, has been wasting his time in the movies. When he can plot and turn out the creativity of a movie role is nothing compared to the first-hand birthing of a really good novel.
It is around the 1930s in a small country town in Connecticut. Niles and Holand Perry are the twin sons of a prominent family. Grandfather Perry’s is a hallowed name in the town and every year the Perrys hold a dinner for the town and select men who administer the Perry money willed for the benefit of town children. The whole book points toward that annual dinner as denoument. But before that point is reached a number of conundrums have presented themselves for out speculation.
Is it true that Niles, born with a caul, has vision beyond the ordinary. And Holland, the elder and stronger of the two, is he simply living out the “boys will be boys” syndrome or is there another dimension to the aura of wickedness that floats around the twin? The boys’ mother, the fragile Alexandra, takes to her room, receding further every day until she seems but a persistent wisp of fog that haloes the house.
What almost happened to Niles when he identified with Chantieleer so strongly that the boy became the rooster? And cousin Russell – what was the curious thing about his death that one struggled so hard to remember? Billy Talcott’s drowning “… thrashing, freezing, in the icy water” – was that a peculiar negligence, that death? And Torrie’s baby – what do the twins have to do with that birthing? Torrie said of her brothers, “I swear they’re gypsies.” But does that explain enough? The book’s questions beckon.
GIVEN A BOOK like “The Other” the discussion has to be of plot first. Technically, Tryon is superb. Every incredible detail is credible. There is a lucidity to the whole that reigns triumphant over the complications of plot.
Yet to confine the conversation to plot alone is to deny other equally important talents. Tryon’s characters come off the page alive and charming. Ada, the twin’s Russian grandmother. Moves with a majesty and a compelling humanity through the maze of the story, superbly feminine and wise. Niles, the empathic twin, is a memorably thoughtful small boy, a dear heart that at 12 can tend his ailing mother in a ritual of love. Hear Tryon on the other twin – “Hollan? Something else again… Holland was a child of the earth; still, guarded, bound within himself, fettered by secrets unshared. Craving love but not able to give it: so mysteriously withdrawn.”
This isn’t a mystery story not a “thriller” that once can dispatch with a simple and curt “well done.” Rather this is an entry into literature, more than a who-done-it, because it bears a lyricism and a validity of human detail that mark the author with an insight common only to good novelists.
Welcome, Mr. Tryon, to the top. What a place to begin!
Two small boys in a ghostly gem
Life Magazine
The Other by Thomas Tryon (Alfred Knopf)
Until this spring, Thomas Tryon was best knows as Hollywood actor, and in particular as the hero of an Otto Preminger film called The Cardinal. But as summer comes on, he may very well find himself being praised (1) as a first novelist of uncommon finesse, who can prune as shapely a sentence as anyone in the table-telling business this year, and (2) as the author of the season’s most original and thoroughly mesmerizing ghost story.
The Other is not a very long book, but it contains enough menace and suspense to chill the hottest hammock afternoon, and along the way throws in such ghoulish niceties as a rat burial, an unattached finger, a baby embalmed in homemade wine, a boy impaled on a pitchfork, a carnival complete with hermaphrodite, five-legged pig and disappearing Chinaman, and by my count, at least six violent deaths (including one by kerosene flambČe) and as many close shaves (including one by bumblebee sting).
Told in retrospect, by a voice which does not declare its identity until the final page (and even then, watch out), The Other deals chiefly with the dread events that scarify a small New England town during the faraway American summer of 1935. And because Mr. Tryon has a tender and very precise recall detail, his nightmare become all the more graphic place in the homely, nostalgic of Kelvinator refrigerators, Atwater Kent radios (playing Easy Aces and First Nighter), and girls in Enna Jettick shoes.
The principal characters are a pair of twins, Holland and Niles, who were born 20 minutes apart and at the vernal equinox, but on either side of midnight, so that they have not only different birth dates but different astrological signs. Emerging at first, and with difficulty, Holland is a Pisces. Niles followed with a lucky caul, the “smoothest delivery: the doctor had ever seen, and an Aries.
Thus, though identical in body, they are radically unalike in soul. Niles is a “joyous spirit, well-posed, warm, affectionate….” Holland is “still, guarded, bound within himself.” Niles is “tender, merry, loving.” Holland is “fettered by secrets, craving love but unable to give it.” Yet from the beginning they are inseparable, and remain each other’s closest friend and mirror image even after the murders have begun. Are we confronted with symbols, then? Are Holland and Niles emblems of Goodness and Evil, or variants on Chain and Abel, or extensions of Billy Budd and Claggart? If so, Mr. Tryon is too pure and robust a story teller to let his intentions show. He sticks cleanly to telling us what happens next, and lets any metaphysical or psychological meanings shimmer where they may. Like Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, he also has his tricks. But he plays scrupulously fair, and when I went back over his traces, I found he had never once said something that was not true, although if I had been more alert I might have noticed the significance of what he did not say at certain points. One thing is sure: for months I shall be grateful for the prickling among my scalp which I felt when I reached page 196. I don’t think my Richter scale has registered a more delicious tremor since the time, decades ago, when I first read “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
As for the larger implications of Mr. Tryon’s twins, it should be remembered that from its beginnings, American writing, highbrow and otherwise, has been obsessed with children. From Poe’s Annabel Lee (“She was a child and I was a child…”) to Huck Finn himself; from Stephen Crane’s boy soldier to Hemingway’s Nick; and more recently, from Carson McCuller’s F. Jasmine Addams to Salinget’s Holden Caulfield to the little boy through whom so much adult life is filtered in Agee’s Death in the Family, our best writers have tended to entrust their deepest , the image of a child. Holland and Niles may simply be the newest additions to this haunting, not necessarily pleasant, but very American list.
By Robert Phelps
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