Book Description

THE STORY: As outlined in the Boston Traveler: While director Paul John Austin, portraying a reporter later identified as Homer, waits for the story to 'jell,' it's like a gay party except for the brooding Telemachus, grousing like Hamlet at his mother's wedding feast. The 100 suitors of his mother, Penelope, have cocktails in the rumpus room, only Antinous emerging now and again to goad the youth about his reading Kafka and Dostoyevsky all summer. Then enters Penelope to send him to the cellar for a big barrel of wine and paper cups, to chide him about dreaming. And finally the return of Odysseus, or rather the 're-entry' since it represents a problem, this returning home. Mr. Gurney has a lot of fun superimposing sailing and skiing, cocktail parties and servant problems, such appurtenances to modern life as bongo boards and Madras dinner jackets. It's all fun, with an underlying but glancing blow at deeper thought. But a blow that is felt-as out of the biting wit comes a perceptive and telling commentary on the way people were, are and always will be.