Word: reader
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...reporter about his ambition as a writer. He is now far more concerned with style than he used to be, and his concern is to render it invisible. What he wants is "a style that is not only unseen but utterly unperceived. A complete negation of style...Give the reader a fact, not a phrase." This ideal, which implies a drastic cleavage between style and content, is shared by most of his contemporaries. They are all experts with a scalpel, and most of them are eager that their art should be popular; the combination of function and desire calls...
Among U.S. writers who share this ambition, Dorothy Parker is one of the best artists, as she is one of the most popular. From the first story, "Horsie," in which she creates a feeling of pathos in the reader by firmly withholding it in herself, to the derisive portrait of an actress called "Glory in the Daytime," her objective skill never falters in making vivid ordinary conversations motivated only by busy curiosity and vapid malice. No one else has her ability to make casual human types seem abysmally fatuous. Just as good in their way are the three or four...
...best available medium. For her mastery of it Mrs. Parker ought to be remembered with Ring Lardner. It is true that absolute objectivity, for all but the greatest writers, is an impossible attitude to maintain, and Mrs. Parker does not always maintain it. But by the time the reader becomes conscious that Mrs. Parker is grinning derisively at her characters as she writes, he realizes that he is grinning derisively himself...
...same on the Malay Archipelago as in East Wapping. Maugham has made the feelings of his characters more important than their dress, the harrowed back-side of their minds more entrancing than their mundane comings and goings in the streets of Singapore; and, oddly enough, he has made the reader follow him, in spite of all the distractions introduced in the shape of Eastern colour and shifting sound...
...pleasant pair. One girl has lived in incest, and ends with suicide. A man loses wife and place because of gross and public cowardice. It is a tribute to the skill of the author that all these themes, so bloody and thundery when related in skeleton, impress the reader of the book as the most natural and commonplace. This fact is perhaps the most convincing proof that Maugham has succeeded in portraying reactions and motives in a way to jibe with the experience...