Word: reader
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TIME'S Essay on the quality of White House intelligence [May 25] jogged one reader's memory back to 1945, when a U.S. Navy assignment required him to ascertain the location of various warships at specific times. "I questioned admirals and captains, who sent me to other admirals and captains," he wrote. "Finally, in the office of an elderly admiral wearing ribbons I had never seen before, I was certain I had reached the end of my quest. I put my questions. He thought for a moment, then said, 'Lieutenant, when I want information of that kind...
...winner had turned out an impressive body of work, was in his 60s, revered by his countrymen and active in the P.E.N. Club. It was all very predictable as Nobel prizewinners go. But The Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata's first U.S. publication since the award, leaves the reader ambivalent: the prize-givers have not made fools of themselves, but there i is little reason for special jubilation at their choice...
...Texan transplanted to New York, his working premise seems to be that everything in the world of supertown is so oversize and so shrill that no one notices any of it. Mass anesthesia is the result. His remedy: to shrink life to the miniature so that the reader is obliged to bend and squint to see the madness, perfectly proportioned to a bizarre cameo...
...Views of My Father Weeping, Barthelme even trivializes death. And by making it so casual, so dull, so buried in petty, everyday detail, he also makes the reader feel the horror of death as no apocalyptic heaping up of corpses could...
Barthelme is a genius at self-consciousness. He uses cliches to make the reader think; he uses parodies to stir emotion. Like a billiard shark trying carom shots, he plays worn emotional impacts and responses against one another. The meaning behind the meaning in his stories is that the old main lines of communication are down. The simple, the forthright, the straightforward can no longer be confidently said. For the time being at least, messages must be sent by mirrors. And at that game, Donald Barthelme knows no peer...