Word: reader
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...Your cover story [May 1] might well have been entitled "A Day in the Life of L.B.J." The five pages devoted to him were certainly as exhaustive (both in covering the subject and in effect upon the reader's imagination) as a book...
...year. While some of it is cocktail-party rant, most is meant seriously. Fiedler, for 20 years professor of English and now chairman of the department at Montana State University, is convinced that fiction and poetry really matter, not just because they delight or possibly instruct the reader, but because they are the symptoms with which to psychoanalyze a civilization. And in his exhaustive survey of novelists from the '30s to the present day, Fiedler concludes that the novel is probably dying and society is very sick...
Only the poets give Fiedler a little hope and the reader some respite. In four effortless, brilliant final chapters, Fiedler charts the continuities of U.S. poetry over the past century, demonstrates how the poets of the past decade have brought the healthy "reappearance of Walt Whitman as a considerable force in our poetry, as well as the rejection of the objectivity and the metaphysical-symboliste tradition sponsored by T. S. Eliot." Ironically, some of these poets are the very beatniks whose novels most disturb him. Yet they have at least got poetry out of the classroom and "into...
Moravia's pattern is distinctive but invariable: a Roman lowlife, male, gives a fourth-drink, first-person account of some minor downfall, failing to see its subtleties and thereby allowing the reader a faint, wry smile. The only thing wrong with the formula is that it does not require much space, and the reader is given only four or five pages between wry smiles. If the book is used as night-table literature, even the weariest citizen cannot achieve unconsciousness without meeting, say, the indignant wife of Federico the upright thief, the witless teen-ager who lives to dance...
Golding's desire to draw a moral also leads him to simplify the other characters to fit general roles. He works out a set of convenient metaphors to describe each of them, and continually sticks in these formulas to remind the reader of the character's place in the general scheme. Jocelin's ecstasy always burns like a flame, and an angel continually appears behind him to stand for his inspired will. The Master Builder and his wife "revolve around each other." And the urge which entangles the Master Builder in adultery with an innocent townswoman is "the net." This...