The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics)

An amazing novel. Insightful, moving, descriptive, disturbing, well written, provocative. A gaze upon human nature during wartime, essentially during one month, April 1944. You won’t be sorry you’ve read this masterful, sensitive work.

John Horne Burns's The Gallery, first published in 1947, was a highly acclaimed first novel about WWIi, a war that launched a thousand novelists' careers. Unlike Mailer, Salinger, Michener, and Wouk, Burns was unable to turn his early success into a sustained literary output. His second novel, Lucifer with a Book (1949), is a roman a clef about Burns's experiences as a prep school teacher, by most accounts a bitter dishing of Burns's coworkers. The overwhelming success of The Gallery (Burns was on the cover of Time) can probably be attributed to several factors: Burns's power of observation and his honest and compassionate depictions of his various uniquely flawed characters; his world-weary, if not outright cynical, take on war which may have appealed to the American public who had likely grown tired of newsreel patriotism; and the book's loose structure (nine "portrait" chapters interwoven with eight "promenade" chapters in which the reminiscences of an anonymous GI are recounted) freed the fledgling novelist from any obligation to create an entirely lucid, tightly integrated whole. Given Burns's penchant for opera and melodrama as attested by his biographer David Margolick (Dreadful, 2013), the book's loose structure may be the novel's saving grace. It is, after all, the story of lives touched by war. If the individual characters' stories had been integrated more forcibly the result would have been a depiction of community (much like what Carson McCullers conjures in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). Instead, Burns projects a world of profound disorder, non-sense, and alienation.Much has been made, and perhaps rightly so, of Burns's frank depictions of homosexuals in the military. Margolick's research and study of Burns's extensive correspondence proves that Burns was aware of the many discreet and indirect ways gays were able to connect with one another during a time when being homosexual was considered both criminal and pathological. That said, for me four " portraits" in the novel stood out. First, is that of Hal, an attractive second lieutenant whose general anomie and lack of faith in any kind of grounding principle evolves into full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. Then there's the portrait of Momma, the proprietress of a bar in Naples that catered to gay clientele (a bar equipped with mirrors into which Momma's customers could look with "a sort of reconnoitering restlessness"). Captain (later Major) Motes's story is given in the sixth portrait ("The Leaf"). Motes is a lazy, unimaginative but advancement-obsessed army bureaucrat in charge of a massive department responsible for reading and censoring all outgoing military correspondence. The homoerotic politics at play in this chapter are disturbing and seem to uncannily foretell what lay ahead for gay military personnel who transitioned into the State Department diplomatic work after the war. The eighth portrait ("Queen Penicillin") is ironically one of the most intimate and personal of Burns's portraits. It is the touching story of an anonymous GI who must undergo an extended treatment for syphilis. Though heterosexual himself, he is pursued by a sergeant who is attracted to him. In a lengthy scene Burns can be said to be depicting a scenario that conservatives relentlessly warn against--the recruitment of innocent youths by seasoned and guileful homosexuals. But what the reader gets is not Zeus swooping down on Ganymede but one of the novel's few authentic movements toward friendship and a caring connection with another human being. The sergeant tells the GI just before the GI is about to leave the hospital, "You are different...I need a friend, you see. Being a dancer has given me an unreal view on life. I'm fed up with the arty boys. I want to know just one real person." Burns does give us opera and drama (and pathos), but it is neatly managed within the "portrait" chapters. These turbulent waters are constrained and channeled by the conversational and reflective "promenade" chapters. In these the recurring motif is a nostalgic and more distanced "I remember..." The GI narrator and his companions travel through strange new lands (ancient in fact, but "new" to them as Americans) discussing the many odd things they are seeing for the first time. They debate and quibble over many things (demonstrating the community-building potential of Democracy's freedom of speech); they are the imperfect but still-aborning conscience of the novel; they are the chorus to a drama that is neither tragic nor comic, but fully both.

Burns wrote a great book here, especially considering his time, born in 1916. His character development is among the very best that I have read anyplace, in many years. In some stories with several characters, I am amazed how each person vividly came to life and is so differentiated. True talent. The settings of northern Africa and mainly around Naples during World War II were well-portrayed. i know Naples and environs very well, and he did a great job here. His portrayals of aspects of military life and the tedium of war are real. There was also some humor, especially in all the various military sub-cultures of which he writes.It's tragic that he died so young and disillusioned, having succumbed to the bottle. In many ways, a must read if you like gay literature, wwII history, and very good writing.

John Horne Burns' novel "The Gallery" was lauded by contemporaries the likes of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Though subsequent works received less glowing reviews and h died young.What I found surprising is the suggestion that readers at the book's release did not recognize the homosexual elements of many of the stories.

Highly recommended giving an unvarnished seldom discussed view of WWII from the perspective of the common people especially their near-starvation in 1944 in Italy.The book's structure is well adapted to the subject - alternating chapters - short biographies of individuals interrupted by geographic and first person observations of places - all knit together by one place - the Gallery - a kind of old-world shopping-mall.One comes away with the full sense of things conveyed by a style which is immune to it's heavy burden of untranslated Italian by virtue of it's overall clarity and richness of detail, metaphor, literary tone-shift, and other tools, including regional American colloquial dialogue, all used with arresting mastery.Finally, the gay stuff is practically invisible - as it was at the time - but no less potent for that - and it contrasts vividly with the almost medieval culture of aristocratic Italian families sheltering their young females during stylized courtship rituals until marriage.

Someone once said that there would be no U.S. literature without lots of liquor. This book completely confirms this. Just one binge drinking and chain-smoking from start to finish. It's of mystery how people can still work constantly under the influence. Perhaps the author is right with his contempt for hisfellow Americans in Naples in 1944 and his scathing cynicism of their attitudes. Maybe some people are so sensitive that they can bear life only permanently inebriated.But drunkenness and self-destruction over 300 pages is just too painful. Highly recommended for confirmed misanthropes.

The media could not be loaded. Thankyou you so much Amazon this book is to good for study. the best part is of book is, big in size easy to understand the painting colour combination of this book. again thanks a lot

Fascinating book about Naples in 1944. The author later drank himself to death. A pity since he had real talent.

…and an exceptional one. First, because its setting is American conquest- the occupied city of Naples in 1944 where Italians and Americans mix in the ebb and flow of humanity, in the streets of a smashed up city, often under the grand ceiling of the Galleria Umberto. Second, because it is such a stubbornly unromantic view of the so-called “greatest generation,” that is, of an American army full of careerists, conmen, thieves, misfits, psychos and syphilitics. Third, it is matter-of-factly candid about the gay presence among the Yanks. Finally, it’s a special book because of Burn’s vision of Neapolitan suffering and the response of the conquerors. Sometimes Americans glimpsing the superiority of the beaten and impoverished and humiliated Italians. Realising they’re a grander humanity. It’s like being there. It makes you think you’ve missed out by not having been there.

The paintings, as well as the quality of the book is great.