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Vamp Until Ready
James Magruder
“A tour de force performance, charming and unstrained.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
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Description
The network of protagonists in Vamp Until Ready. Cary Dunkler, Isa Vass, Kristy Schroyer, Judy Gabelson, and Mark Shinner have lives that are transformed in surprising ways by working on or backstage at the Hangar Theatre, a summer stock outfit in upstate New York in the 1980’s. They make—and remake—their families in this closely observed, ultimately comic valentine to the Socialist-leaning hamlet of Ithaca and to the pleasures of putting on a show at warp speed in hot weather.
Praise for Vamp Until Ready
About the Author
James Magruder has published four other books of fiction: Sugarless, Let Me See It, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, and Vamp Until Ready (also from Rattling Good Yarns). Yale University Press published his Three French Comedies, a collection of translations that was cited as an “Outstanding Literary Translation of the Year” by the American Literary Translators Association; and The Play’s the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016), his first—and last—book of non-fiction. His translations and adaptations of works by Marivaux, Molière, Lesage, Labiche, Gozzi, Dancourt, Hofmannsthal, Dickens, and Giraudoux have been produced off-Broadway, across the country, and in England, Japan, Australia, and Germany. He wrote, or co-wrote, the books for two Broadway musicals, Triumph of Love, and the more recent Head Over Heels, a deeply queer, blank verse mashup of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. He is a five-time MacDowell Fellow and a 34-year resident of Baltimore.
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Praise
Praise for Vamp Until Ready
A precise, affectionate collection of linked stories follows the lives of several “townies” in Ithaca, New York, from 1980 through 1992.
Magruder—playwright, translator, and author of Let Me See It (2014)—begins from the point of view of Cary Dunkler, who, having graduated from high school a few years ago, is spinning his wheels working at the Army-Navy store selling “Belgian knapsacks and the world’s scratchiest socks.” His foster brother, Dave, who has just graduated after attending Cornell on a full scholarship, convinces Cary to try out for the local Hangar Summer Theatre, where Dave’s boyfriend, Gavin, is the artistic director. While Cary may not be a natural at musical theater, the job does net him a “showmance,” propels his life in an unexpected direction, and leads him years later to “claim that his life before the Hangar gig had just been vamping until ready.” With Cary’s summer over, Magruder jumps a couple of years forward, into the points of view of Cary’s co-worker Kristy, a minor character in the first section, and her children’s babysitter, Isa, a theatre major at Ithaca College who become involved with both that year’s season at the Hangar and with Kristy’s disreputable ex-husband, Wayne, a “hazel-eyed, cigarette-ad charmer.” The next two stories jump again in time and into the lives of two previously minor characters before the book circles back to Cary in the final story. It’s a tour de force performance, charming and unstrained, in which changes taking place offstage magically reset the narrative, and where the theater, with its state of “perpetual panic,” and Ithaca, with its “sprouty culture,” play roles as important as any character.
A pleasant romp deepened by its insights into character.
“James Magruder’s warm-hearted, hair-raising, and hilarious new novel, Vamp Until Ready, is a cross between Winesburg, Ohio and a backstage musical—a panorama of small-town American life over a dozen years, but a dozen particular years during the era of Reagan-Bush, the global AIDS crisis, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. And not just any town: Ithaca, New York, a college town with a hippie hangover and a cast of literally theatrical characters who are always putting on a play. In the novel’s ingenious structure, major characters in one chapter appear as minor characters in the next, and vice versa, as if you held up a multi-faceted gem and kept turning it in the light until every surface was illuminated. Magruder’s gift is to make you feel like you’ve gotten to be friends with a bunch of charming, fallible, wounded and wounding, passionate and compassionate people who are yearning for—and sometimes avoiding—connection. Like us.”
“This novel is a triumphant romp. We’re privileged with intimate portraits of a group of friends as they roam from Ithaca to Uganda, from love to grief, from ambition to reconciliation. James Magruder’s Vamp Until Ready is a pure pleasure.”
“A hilarious, moving novel inhabited by characters who are both outrageous and utterly human, linked not only by a theater in Ithaca but by their desire to be loved. With its seductive, Russian doll structure and gorgeous prose, Vamp Until Ready captivates and delights.”