Word: heather
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Here, as in his fine first novel, The Pursuit of Happiness, Thomas Rogers deals in blessed innocence. Problems and difficulties exist for Samuel Heather, Rogers' "child of the century." But so do miraculously facile solutions. Happiness does not depend on the sweaty pursuit of knowledge. Heather simply acquires his erudition and wisdom from Rogers, a professor of English at Penn State, and wears it with casual eccentricity. Scenes, values and fortunes change as easily as channels on a TV set remotely controlled from a comfortable couch...
...Heather's first switch occurs when he is tossed out of Harvard for exploding a stick of dynamite. He enlists in the Army, thus postponing a showdown with his father, an Episcopal bishop. One of the many sweet insights that Heather offers about his parental problems is that he had a sibling rivalry with Jesus Christ. The time is 1950, and before Heather can make sense out of the Korean War, he is in an enemy prison camp. For reasons that have nothing to do with brainwashing, he chooses to defect to Red China, where he goes bamboo...
Before long, he is returned with his wife to the U.S., where he continues to back into happiness. First Heather clips Chinese newspapers for the CIA. Next he writes successful spy novels. After a personal revelation from God on the Paris Metro, he sits down to concoct his autobiography. It is the very novel one has been reading. He calls it a "comical-historical-pastoral," which echoes Hamlet but excuses a great many loose ends. It also gives Rogers, a crafty, winsome novelist, the freedom essential to the telling of a shaggy God story. ·R.Z.S...
...Culloden and dark days for Scotland. Even the action sequences generate little more excitement than a Frisbee tournament. When he doesn't know what else to do -which seems to be most of the time -Director Mann throws in a lingering shot of the distant lochs or the heather on the hill...
...really happy when I read the story about Heather and realized that Leverett still wanted a lot of women," one freshman said Tuesday...