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...Hate Love." Having at last dug up her creative capital, Author Porter disbursed it with incredible stinginess. She spent the next nine years making notes for three 50-page stories and then dashed them off in a mere three weeks. In these stories the reader becomes aware for the first time that something had gone seriously awry in the author's life. In Old Mortality, the story of her own emergence from anxious adolescence into worried womanhood, she describes for the first time the emotion that dominates her later work: misanthropy. "She would have no more bonds that smothered...
...magnitude of the tragedy will be painfully apparent to the reader of this collection of stories. Author Porter has superb natural gifts. She has irony, she has imagery, she has language. "Her style," wrote Glenway Wescott, "is perfection. It just covers its subject matter as if it were green grass growing on a lawn." Above all, she can think-and therein lies her principal problem. She sees her characters less as people who must live than as problems to be solved. There is too little warmth and softness in her art. But hardness endures, and six or eight...
...when the mystery novel is designed more for the economy-class airline traveler than for the home armchair reader, Rex Stout's way has not changed. After 31 years, Nero Wolfe is still 286 Ibs. large, still guzzles at least a dozen beers and tends his orchids for precisely four hours daily, still abhors leaving his Manhattan house on business, and never goes near a sports car or chases a blonde. While thus ignoring Bondomania and its sibling rivals, Stout and Wolfe are doing just fine. If The Doorbell Rang holds true to recent form, it will sell...
Stout once said all that he thinks is important to say. A good mystery writer, he wrote, merely tells the reader: " 'Let's run a race. Here goes my mind, I'm off, see if you can catch me.' " In Doorbell, even FBI fans will have to admire his agility...
...insecurities. Unhappily, in this, her eighth and longest novel, Novelist Spark finally pays dearly for her indifference. She is obviously much more interested in the sights and sounds on both sides of the Mandelbaum Gate, which separates Israel and Jordan, than she is in her characters, and soon the reader discovers that he is too. Worse still, in order to shift them around, Novelist Spark resorts to a series of involved intrigues and page after page of gentle nattering. For a writer whose prose is generally among the most direct and polished in the business, this must have been...