Word: reader
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...himself farcical but because he is serious-about love, about music, and about the postwar world. Gallantly, he survives each pratfall (even when ordered to take a class in elementary shorthand when he should have been waving his long hands over an orchestra sawing out his own music). The reader laughs uneasily; this is no ordinary slapstick, nor a Chaplinesque comedy of awkward grace amid military bullies and oafs...
...lawyer in Auchincloss forbears to pass judgment. Instead, he lets Guy Prime, Rex Geer and Angelica do it, in each of the book's three parts. Their testimony conflicts so widely, just as testimony does in courts, that the reader may end up wishing that the author had donned magistrate's robes and handed down a verdict...
...Headmaster Frank Prescott assembled a fascinating portrait of a man whose substance did not have to be judged to beguile. But it does not work in The Embezzler, partly because these are not very interesting people, mainly because Auchincloss' total detachment invites the same reaction from the reader. If the book makes any point, it is even more familiar than Auchincloss' gilt-edged landscapes are by now: that the only difference between rich people and poor people is money...
Sylvia Townsend Warner's genteel and wonderfully Victorian prose has always seemed at first sampling to be as innocuous as dandelion wine. Only after the unwary reader is under its influence does he discover that it is laced with gall and witchy nightshade, not to mention a dollop or two of venom...
...BOOZE READER by George Bishop. 288 pages. Sherbourne Press...