An innocent millionaire

by Stephen Vizinczey

Book Overview

"Brilliantly inventive, written with great flair and shows a deliciously comic and ironic sense of American realities."--Alfred Kazin "The virtues of Vizinczey's] style are those he finds in Hungarian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871130157
• ISBN13: 9780871130150
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 369 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Finally, an honest man!

Stephen Vizinczey (sp?) is, in my estimation, the greatest living author I've read. Or at least my favorite. He is also a great hero of mine, and I do not have many heros. Why is this? The man tells the truth. He isn't concerned with the consequences of revealing his thoughts to all comers. A previous reviewer accused him of misogyny, but I don't believe she's read "In Praise." I think what she was pointing to is a quality I regard as a virtue in Mr. Vizinczey. He is brutally honest in all things, and for a man playing at being omniscient, he does a pretty good job. One of these things he is honest in is the role that appearance plays in our thoughts and interactions. Some people use sex appeal outside of the bedroom. Sometimes the social progress people make in life is tied to their attractiveness, and sometimes this is not the case. Mr. Vizinczey is not the only one who finds this remarkable. Mr. Vizinczey has also taught me a great deal about life. To get any lasting knowledge from a book is noteworthy, but the roles that two of his have played in my life seem more like the work of the Hand of God. I read this book at the age of 24, working my way up the economic and social ladder in NYC, and at the same time, hating the goals of success. The first 200 pages confirmed my beliefs about the cannibalistic nature of success, and then, as I contemplated giving up on my idea of success, my fictional alter-ego's luck got better. He met a lawyer who took on the case he had previously lost all hope in winning, and still was not quite convinced that it was worth trying. Mark Niven said something like, "The world is evil!" To which his attorney replied, raising his arms and looking at the sky, "But there is also chance." Damn, that was a valuable lesson.

The World of Stephen Vizinczey

In difficult times we like to turn to books, especially to novels. But it would be a mistake to think that only light and syrupy stories bring us relief. On the contrary, we need the company of authors who, thanks to their perceptiveness and creative vigor, describe the world as it is, without false embellishment. We sense that these writers are able to face the worst of all possible worlds because they keep alive in themselves the promise of peace and goodness. For this reason we are moved by their vision.Vizinczey's Innocent Millionaire brings us such a subtle solace. The novel is an enthralling roller-coaster of fortunes and passions, full of striking dialogues. It even manages to say something new about the birth of love. Marianne, the heroine of an ultimately tragic love affair, is one of the most lovable woman I have ever encountered in fiction, surpassing even the desirable and generous ladies of the author's previous masterpiece In Praise of Older Women. But this is a very different novel. Here the author weaves a tragic love relationship into the story of a fraud, showing how small and ridiculous are all those stupid and greedy people who make our life miserable or dull. If you are satisfied with the world as it is and approve its values, you will scorn this book. But for the dissatisfied reader, it is a rare treat and a unique source of comfort.

Must read

I read this book once in high school and once in my third year of college. When I first read An Innocent Millionaire I was intrigued by the adventure. As an adult I found that the book was really about life , of tragedy and the state of the world we live in. This book is a must read.

Sunken Treasure

PICKING UP SUNKEN TREASURE: A few words to retrieve An Innocent Millionaire from the depths of obscurity. When people aren't distracted by the twin opiates (would that be 'opia'?) of sports and electronic media, they want stories that are mostly about relationships. Stephen Vizinczey's AN INNOCENT MILLIONAIRE (University of Chicago Press) has all that: Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl. But the gripping and sometimes graphic love story is secondary to the hero's struggles with the world, with society, with the Tolstoyan conundrum of 'how to live'. Having just finished re-reading AN INNOCENT MILLIONAIRE, it's hard not to proclaim its greatness and wonder why it's not more widely discussed and celebrated. It's such a prodigouus outpouring of wisdom and precise writing, AIM makes most other contemporary novels seem immature, half-baked. Was it poorly marketed? Does the author have a surname that is too hard to pronounce? The story concerns an intrepid young man, Mark, who is determined to make his own way. A student of Spanish colonial history, Mark searches for and successfully finds buried treasure in the Caribbean. Our hero is stubborn and presumably naive but his faith in himself is justified. His ambition is pure and harmless. Along the way he picks up a beautiful lover, the wife of an American corporate mogul. Her children adore Mark. But the intensely jealous mogul has mafia connections. Lawyers, governments and criminals conspire to take nearly all of Mark's treasure. Our hero is plunged into an abyss of litigation. He loses the girl...It's a modern tragedy. It strikes me that AIM can't be popular because it's too penetrating and too thoughtful. Fiction that is clearly serious about morality threatens the majority of people who are busy leading essentially bourgeois lives. Most of us are trained to accept stories that are like another form of gossip, auto-gossip if you will, merely one rung above the tattle that is paraded at the grocery check-out. Most people want stories that are distractions, not refractions of moral dilemmas. If Tolstoy came back to life in the year 2000, he'd be laughed at. Jesus wouldn't even get past the front door of the TV stations. I'm bothering to mention my reaction to this novel for two reasons, both coincidental. First, I came across a 1998 Sunday Times news story, 'Castro hunts billions in sunken gold'. Like the character in Vizinczey's novel, Castro and a Canadian company are making a concerted effort to recover treasure on the ocean floor from the many sunken galleons that were attacked by English and French pirates. Like Mark in the novel, Castro, as a young man, was captivated by the documented accounts and legendary tales of fortunes that were lost at sea.Secondly, I recently printed a poetry column (in the publication I publish) by a critic named Gary Geddes. He quoted something from Sartre that suggests contemporary writing must have an essential lightne

Criticizing the critiques

On the advice of a good bookseller, of the kind that has now practically disappeared, I read An Innocent Millionaire quite some time ago. Through that novel I discovered Stephen Vizinczey. The quality of the book inevitably led me to read all his other work, including his essays, which are models of clairvoyance.I acquired the habit of reading some decades ago, and that habit not only taught me to distinguish the good literature from the bad, but also to appreciate it as a source of knowledge, rather than only of entertainment.The novel that I am referring to is a veritable fountain of knowledge. It is ideal for those who do not know the USA (or the world), and even more so for those Americans who wish to comprehend their country. Although the future of a work of art is not predictable, this may well be one of those novels that, in a hundred years, will be read to learn of a culture and of a civilization.But I am not writing these lines to praise An Innocent Millionaire. Its caliber has already been recognized by people such as Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. And the critics have unanimously (or almost) rated it as one of the books of the century. I am writing to identify a significant error that I have found in some critiques. In many of these, the book has been categorized as an "adventure novel." Due to the current understanding of the meaning of the word "adventure" this is totally misleading.The first (and perhaps the best ever) adventure novel from the Western Hemisphere, from which all subsequent novels originated, was Adventures of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The fact is that the word "adventure", from Latin adventurus or advenire, simply meant `things about to happen'. Today, unfortunately, it is associated with the leaps and bounds of James Bond or Indiana Jones.I do not believe that there is a single novel (including those written in the past tense) in which there are not `things about to happen'. Even the epic poems of Homer could be considered adventure novels. Especially The Odyssey, a work that was transformed, in the cinematographic version with Kirk Douglas, into what is today considered an "adventure".I condemn those critiques that lightly pigeonhole works of art. An Innocent Millionaire is a book full of ideas and concepts, with brilliant dialogues that are not only meant to sustain actions. Perhaps this is the reason that MGM is taking so long to make the film. If the novel is not well understood, there is a distinct risk of transforming a contemporary epic poem written in prose (I prefer this classification for An Innocent Millionaire), into a banal adventure.Pablo Urbanyi