Word: reader
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...These stories are in his lesser mode. In fact, the stratagem of treating suburbia as if it were a sacred grove, with every flowering tree an imprisoned nymph, works best when it is worked least. One story, for instance, begins: "Larry Actaeon was built along classical lines . . ." and the reader, with the help of a mythological dictionary, recalls that Actaeon observed Diana at her bath and was punished by being turned into a stag and torn apart by hounds. All too patly, Larry Actaeon sees a lady partner in his investment-banking firm naked in the office of an associate...
Lowell is the poet par excellence of the particular. Too prosy for some tastes, he insists that poems must incorporate the prosiness of life; poetry must be as important as prose. He ignores the usual poetical devices that are calculated to woo a reader, makes no concession to sound for its own sake. As he describes Hawthorne in one poem, his head is often bent down, "Brooding, brooding, eyes fixed on some chip,/some stone, some common plant,/the commonest thing,/as if it were the clue...
...reader who stops short of seeing Davis as tragic must admit that he was an extraordinary man, whose best quality was an inflexible devotion to principle. Davis had been a minor but authentic hero of the Mexican War, an exemplary Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce and, up to a few weeks before he was called to the presidency of the seceding states, an outstanding member of the U.S. Senate. His maltreatment after the Civil War was shameful. President Andrew Johnson signed a proclamation ridiculously charging him with complicity in the assassination of Lincoln, and he was kept in prison...
...this run-down of the basic Goodman position comes from extrapolation. Goodman's books never give his reader a clear notion of his basic assumptions. And, had Goodman presented his theoretical framework to his audience in Burr last spring, he might have won over more people. As it turned out his alarmingly candid remarks about his own sexual hang-ups struck the audience as willy-nilly. Yet the primary appeal remained: If you want more sex, follow...
Blechman's first novel was a funny and sparely written example of that familiar genre, the satiric comedy of Jewish urban life. Stations is far more ambitious, and if it fails at last-too heavy, too short to teach the reader the symbols, and yet sometimes too obvious-it is more arresting than the bland small successes that are published by the dozen each week...