Word: reader
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Rose is in earnest about his good and evil. Taking Alan as his instance, he persuades the reader to see demonology as a metaphor of adolescence. At the turning of the teens, Rose suggests, a child is taken over by conflicting identities-opposing demons fighting for dominance. Furthermore, Rose hints, pointing at the papas and mamas, the middle-aged American, too, is still waiting for a demon to put a blaze in his heart and a fever in his imagination and lead him through some mind-blowing rites of passage...
...almost unknown beyond it. He is an existential therapist. This practice, which claims only a few hundred adherents in the U.S., is dismissed in some quarters as either trivial or derivative. For ordinary travelers, the theory makes heavy going indeed. Love and Will demands of even the most persistent reader the same emotional and intellectual commitment that the author made three decades...
...word. d;sinterest-ed view. More than any other novelist, he is proof that to become a significant writer, a man must be neither an idea machine nor a recording angel, but a human voice sounding with its own shifting intonations in the ear and heart of the reader. Describing the peculiar discrepancy between apparent message and feeling in Forster's novels, Lionel Trilling observed: " 'Wash ye, make yourselves clean,' says the plot, and the manner murmurs, 'If you can find the soap...
...reader is likely to know that already. The question is raised: What is the point of a book whose principal characteristic is a kind of aggressive, self-destructive candor? Travers clearly deserves sympathy and even, to a degree, admiration. After all, he sticks by his son and eventually saves him. Yet a nagging sense of mixed motives, the author's and the reader's, keeps intruding...
...ends are so frayed these days that it is impossible to read anything about teen-age addiction without being touched, without involuntarily plunging around in it looking for ourselves, for our children, brothers, sisters, friends, as well as for reassurances and clues. In the end this book and the reader's reaction to it may both be symptoms of an incorrigible American tendency to expose and eventually trivialize deep, personal agonies, to exorcise fear by talking about it to anyone who will listen. Each Other's Victims is not a very good book; what it says about...