Submitted by edward fox, Mar 23, 2007 08:09

The tributes to George Trow seem to skate over my favourite part of his work: his fiction. I first became aware of him in New York in the late 70s, when his short fictions were appearing regularly in the New Yorker. These were not short stories in the traditional sense because they were formally quite strange, but they were so funny! They were cruel, surrealistic and socially acute, all at the same time. I note that there is a collection, Bullies, published in 1980: I hope that all his stories are in there. He also wrote a novel, The City in the Mist, which is a fascinating mixture of nostalgia for Old New York and modernist (not post-modernist -- please spare me!) literary artifice.

Also, don't forget that the first ever Merchant-Ivory movie was a strange, decadent, bizarre, gorgeous, gloriously pretentious movie called Savages. One of the stars (the only one I can remember) was the Warhol superstar who went by the name of Viva. I remember a lesbian sex scene. Its screenplay was written by George Trow: he was the movie's true author.

I met him a couple of times in the late 70s, as a teenager. He took me to dinner! With Jamaica Kincaid! (Gorgeous, extremely nice and extremely clever, two things that rarely go together.) And P. J. O'Rourke (I remember even then him saying at dinner, "I'm a RePOBlican," which was not the thing people tended to say in those days). Trow was exhilaratingly funny. Taken to task for expressing a particularly mad and exuberant observation, he replied, "I can't help it. I'm over-vivid."

Rest in peace.

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