National Book Critics Circle

 
Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg
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Innocence meets experience
A Review by Elsbeth Lindner

Contemplating Sylvia Brownrigg's short new novel, the adjective quirky comes to mind time and again. Bold, dry, eccentric, Morality Tale cries out for a descriptive term that can pinpoint its oddness hand-in-hand with its likeability. Quirky it will have to be, for this curious, teasing, idiosyncratic and strangely charming book.

It's a twenty-first-century cautionary tale whose generic title also evokes the morality play, an allegorical and didactic model common in the fifteenth century. The novel's central relationship pivots on a married man's choice to start an affair because he and his lover want to save one another. "What's wrong with that?" (79) another character asks, voicing our ethically flexible era. But morality plays were invented precisely to illustrate the wrong -- the vice -- and to push for virtue, by confronting Everyman with symbolic characters as a means of enforcing upright conduct. If there's an echo of that form here, then perhaps its narrator, a nameless...
 
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