The Short History of a Prince: A Novel - Softcover

As a teenager in Oak Ridge, Illinois, Walter McCloud is desperate for adventure, hoping for love and success as a dancer. "If life for Walter was composed in part of confusion, shame and deception, the ballet was order, dignity and forthright beauty." In 1995, at 38, nothing has turned out as he had expected. Having spent years working in a dollhouse shop in New York and engaging in that city's ready sexual excitement, Walter finally returns to his Midwestern roots, accepting a teaching job in Otten, Wisconsin--a place that might have little to recommend it save its proximity to his family's summer home. ("It had taken Walter several years to admit to himself that he couldn't go on indefinitely selling Lilliputian Coke bottles and microscopic toilet-roll dowels.") In this new community, he will have to keep his head down, a stance that has long suited him, because he prefers to hold one memory of lost intimacy and perfection in high, private relief.

Walter's exile, or new start, allows memory to come to the fore, particularly that painful year in which his brother was dying of Hodgkin's and he and his fellow dancers were dying for experience. Jane Hamilton explores the distance between desire and reality, satisfaction and secrecy, irresistibly alternating between past and present. At first, we can't wait for Walter to break through, and it's tempting to race through her prince's history--one which is, happily, not that short. But to do so would be to miss out on Hamilton's fine major and minor characters and her exploration of competition, complicity, and silence. At one point, Walter fears that his pupils have "no clue that there was pleasure to be found in observing character. They seemed to be afraid to look around themselves and find a world every bit as amusing, ridiculous and unjust as Dickens's London..." Hamilton's readers, however, will find this pleasure in abundance.

Readers love Hamilton not only for the beauty of her prose and the profundity of her story lines but also for her psychological precision and authorial benevolence. As she did in A Map of the World (1994), Hamilton once again knowingly evokes the timbre of midwestern life and the all but unbreachable insularity of families deeply rooted to the land, then examines the effects on such traditionally solid ground of atypical personalities and deep tragedy. Three sisters jointly own a big old house where everyone gathers for holidays and special events. Jeannie is a bit fey, Joyce quietly elegant, and Sue Rawson (always referred to by her full name) an ogre. Or so everyone believes except for Joyce's younger son, Walter McCloud- the prince of the title and the novel's smart, funny, and altruistic narrator- because it is his recalcitrant aunt, butch as she is who opens the world of ballet to her gay nephew, and he is forever grateful. Using holiday gatherings as touchstones, Hamilton tells Walter's story in two time frames; his high-school days in the early 1970s and the present. As a teenager, Walter falls in unrequited love with a fellow dancer named Mitch; forges a lifelong friendship with Mitch's girlfriend; realizes that he'll never make it as a professional dancer; and loses his older brother to cancer. As an adult nearing 40, Walter returns to Wisconsin after a lively but largely frivolous interlude in New York City, accepts a position teaching literature to artistically challenged high-school students, and seeks to heal old wounds. Such elements of plot are involving and resonant, but it is Hamilton's extraordinary insights into human nature that make this novel shine as she transforms ordinary occurrences- a conversation, a prank, a moment of intimacy- into nothing less than intimations of the divine.
-Booklist Upfront / January 1 & 15, 1998

Hamilton brings to her third novel the same qualities of emotional integrity and compassionate understanding that distinguished The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World....
-Publishers Weekly / December 22, 1997

A meditative, slow-moving and thoroughly absorbing family drama- about loving, losing, and holding on to all we can...this is a lyrical, bighearted novel that won't easily be forgotten.
-Kirkus Reviews / January 15, 1998

...Hamilton's forte- depicting adolesccents left not by villainy but by circumstance on the fringes of family life while they figure out ways to raise themselves- is at its most painful clarity in this novel. Highly recommended.
-Library Journal / February 1, 1998