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Courage, Dear Reader! Lo and Behold are Fielding's favorite characters, and Richardson makes frequent and gloriously funny use of them. His actors catch the spirit of the thing from the first scene, and they have a picnic. The characters are rumbustious caricatures. Joyce Redman is a soggy old piece of cake. Finney is Tom clean through-a fine strapping country boy whose heart is in the right place even when his foremost interest isn't. But Hugh Griffith is the man to watch. A tankard in one hand, a buttock in the other, Squire Western superbly defines...
...book, without exploring or developing them. At best, any expansion of those insights, is obscured by lack of organization. Geismar might learn from those academicians he so despises ("James is the perfect academic novelist") that literary criticism and literary history demand more than just chronological order. Even a reader intimately familiar with James's work will be confused by Geismar's haphazard approach to analysis and by his assumption that everybody already knows the psychological history of the James family. Sadly, Geismar bases his entire thesis on James's personal inadequacies...
...important to give the reader a sense of how this once-talented, once-creative writer's abominable prose drugs its hairy snowman feet across column after column of type. Follow his traces hoping to find something, but always at the end you find nothing there. Mailer concludes, as far as I can tell, that Mary finked the job because "nice girls live on the thin juiceless crust of the horror beneath, the screaming incest, the buried diabolisms.... Yet Mary is too weak to push through the crust and so cannot achieve a view of the world which has root...
...democracy, justice, and economic growth; the other, conceived in bloodshed, is dedicated to violence, totalitarianism and the destruction of human freedom. The former will take time; the latter can come with the dawn. They cannot survive side by side. Latin Americans must choose between them." Time and again the reader finds an intelligent and informative discussion of the Latin situation juxtaposed with an irrational and inexcusably demagogic tirade against the "international communist conspiracy" or "the wild-eyed, messianic posture" of Castro's Cuba...
There is evidence that the Book-ofthe-Month Club could not exist with out Rumer Godden. In the 24 years since she published Black Narcissus, she has provided B.O.M. with half a dozen of those soft-focus domesticated dra mas that brush across a reader's mind as soothingly as a summer breeze...