A Crowd of Voices

Richard Lortz

Richard Lortz, considered a literary author in the fifties, has been getting a posthumous string of second chances over the past couple of decades. For the most part, these center around his short novel Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (1978), which some hardcore horror fans see as a classic of the genre in the making. Lortz has been compared to authors as disparate as M. R. James and Tennessee Williams, and one internet fan site goes so far as to compare his works to the paintings of Max Ernst. (Perhaps not as much of a stretch as it sounds, given that Lortz was also a painter.) One of the books that small presses have not been struggling to bring back into print for the past twenty years is A Crowd of Voices, and now I'm pretty sure I understand why.

A Crowd of Voices is ostensibly the story of Martin, a young free spirit artist-type in the fifties whose psychological makeup batters against that of his stodgy, upperclass relatives (the crowd of voices of the title). Unfortunately, Martin, who may be the only interesting one in the book, is relegated to minor character status throughout as we are dragged through endless interactions between other characters while Martin sequesters himself in his room. I'm sure I could have been less interested in the goings-on of these painfully shallow (and meant to be so by the author, obviously) characters, but I'm not certain how I'd have gone about achieving it.

I never did find anything while looking around that compared Lortz to Henry James, but I'm not sure I've ever come across a novel that encapsulates "The Dead's" quality of "if you want to write a story about boring characters, write a boring story" quite so well as this one.