The Cream of the Jest
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This novel offers a profound and beautifully written meditation on the power of art and imagination to transform the mundane, while wryly acknowledging the inescapable limitations of reality.
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Book Summary
Felix Kennaston, a discontented writer, escapes his mundane life through vivid dreams of a medieval romance world, where he is the poet Horvendile pursuing the idealized Ettarre. The novel explores the blurred boundaries between reality and illusion, ultimately revealing that his dream woman is inspired by his own wife.
Felix Kennaston, a middle-aged writer of tolerable verse, undergoes a mysterious transformation after finding a sigil, leading him to write the acclaimed novel 'Men Who Loved Alison.' The story unfolds as Kennaston's own account, pieced together from notes, of his double life: by day, a socially awkward husband in a dull marriage; by night, the poet Horvendile in the dream world of Storisende, where he serves the beautiful Ettarre. Horvendile orchestrates a plot to win Ettarre for himself, but ultimately reveals he is the creator of this dream world and its characters. Kennaston's dreams grow increasingly vivid, taking him to historical settings like 17th-century France and the French Revolution, where he and Ettarre face death. His obsession with the sigil and his dream life causes him to neglect his waking existence. He discovers the missing half of the sigil hidden in his wife Kathleen's bathroom press, realizing she is the real-world Ettarre. When he confronts her, she denies knowledge of it, forcing him to accept that their shared life cannot accommodate his dream world. After Kathleen's death, the sigil is found intact among her effects, but the narrator reveals it is merely the metal top of a cold cream jar, designed by P. N. Flaherty, underscoring the novel's central irony: that the source of Kennaston's transcendent dreams was a mundane object.
Reading guide
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Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Felix Kennaston
Kennaston is a country gentleman and former verse-writer whose late-blooming novel makes him a minor celebrity he greets with urbane amusement, even as he privately feels his real self slipping elsewhere. His marriage to Kathleen has settled into affectionate incomprehension: she urges him toward up-to-date, marketable fiction while he retreats into a world she will not read. The sigil he discovers opens that retreat into something stranger, and his growing detachment from ordinary human standards of value is what drives the book's central inquiry into dream, identity, and authorship.
Horvendile
Horvendile is the witty, faintly blasphemous servant whose quick wits have rescued Ettarre from Maugis d'Aigremont and whose clear-eyed mockery unsettles the chivalric certainties around him. He loves Ettarre hopelessly and confesses it with a shrug, arguing that love must aim at something not quite accessible; his envy of the immaculate Guiron curdles into a weary sense that he is watching a romance close its last page. He matters because his restlessness and his longing for a life that employs every faculty mirror Kennaston's own, and the half-sigil Ettarre gives him at parting is the hinge between the two worlds.
La Beale Ettarre
La Beale Ettarre is the sister of Count Emmerick and the center of a notable marriage-feast, a woman whose big blue eyes have troubled many men's sleep and whose happiness is shadowed only by the surviving menace of Maugis d'Aigremont. She pities Horvendile's hopeless love with genuine tenderness, yet cannot return it, and her serene certainty about virtue and nobility quietly rebukes his irony. As the figure Kennaston's imagination keeps circling, she is the inaccessible ideal whose various historical guises give the novel its recurring question: whether the woman we dream of can ever be the woman we marry.
Mrs. Kennaston
Kathleen Kennaston is the competent mistress of the household, preoccupied with gasoline engines and clipping-bureaus, who has lived beside her husband's abilities without quite crediting them. She defers reading Men Who Loved Alison on various pretexts and treats it as a private joke that she alone has not read the book everyone discusses, a humor Kennaston finds neither funny nor wifely. Her cheerful suggestion that he write something dealing with real life, and make money from it, exposes the gulf between his dream-values and her domestic ones, making her the quiet counterweight to everything the sigil offers him.
Kathleen Saumarez
Before her marriage Kathleen Eppes Saumarez earned precarious bread as a lecturer and journalist, reviewing books she came to loathe, and she now cares even less for books as art than the average honest woman. That weary professional skepticism makes her the perfect domestic foil to a husband who lives through fictions, and it colors the way she receives his sudden success. The colophon Kennaston writes for Men Who Loved Alison, celebrating books as travel that lets one exchange one's personality for another's, reads very differently once we know the reviewer he married, and her presence sharpens the novel's meditation on why we read at all.
Maugis d'Aigremont
Maugis d'Aigremont is the lurking menace of Storisende, a knight and magician whose persistency Ettarre fears even in her happiness and whose motives Horvendile frankly calls base. He has been driven into hiding after his attempt on Ettarre, but his resourcefulness and theatrical wickedness make him a foil to the too-perfect Guiron, and Horvendile's half-admiring talk of him unsettles Ettarre's moral certainties. His shadow over the marriage-feast keeps the imagined world from becoming merely idyllic, and his resemblance to something in Horvendile's own face hints that villainy and dreamer may share a root.
Dream vs. Reality
The central conflict of the novel, where Felix Kennaston escapes the tedium and disappointment of his mundane life through vivid dreams of the medieval world of Poictesme, ultimately questioning which realm is more real and meaningful.
Art and Illusion
The book explores how art, literature, and imagination create a more ordered and beautiful existence than actual life, with Kennaston's writing and the sigil serving as gateways to a transcendent, idealized reality.
The Search for Meaning
Kennaston's lifelong quest for purpose and fulfillment—through love, fame, wealth, and art—reveals the human tendency to defer happiness to an imagined 'tomorrow' that never arrives.
Love and Idealization
The novel contrasts earthly, imperfect love with the unattainable, idealized love represented by Ettarre, showing how romantic longing is often directed toward a perfect image rather than a real person.
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