Paradise

First Edition.
Simon, a fifty-three-year-old Philadelphia architect, has been given an almost miraculous gift —a year of his own, to do with as he wishes. In a large, bare New York apartment, he lives like a ghost, thinking back on an unsuccessful marriage and his working life. Through a combination of circumstances he becomes involved with three young and beautiful women, who come to live with him. He is twice as old as they are, as they cheerfully and repeatedly point out, yet is drawn into a shifting, complex relation-ship. The three women, Dore, Veronica, and Anne, are very different, lively and intelligent but in important ways lost in the world, grappling for purchase. For the eight months of their stay, alternately advancing and retreating, they test the possibilities of the liaison, as Simon, from the special perspective of one not young, awaits their inevitable departure.
This spare, deliberate novel, at once horrifically comic and bluntly melancholy, is a splendid achievement, astonishing in its erotic directness. The critic Richard Ellmann, writing in The New York Review of Books, said: “Barthelme’s talent is high-pitched and unbending. Someone might say, ‘Now that we have learned to fly, teach us, respected master, how to walk.’ But Barthelme will have nothing to do with mere ambulation, and we, so freshened, ask only that he continue to dip, wheel, and hover.” Paradise displays this mastery at its height.