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Philip Roth makes readers skeptical of his new novel from the outset. "For legal reasons," he says in the preface, "I have had to alter a number of facts in this book." In the preface, Roth the author is already mixing it up with Roth the character, confusing what is real and what is fictional, what is altered and what is hallucinatory. Operation Shylock: A Confession plays a steady game of doubled identities and Roth the author supports the truth of the volume "out of uniform," so to speak, in interviews where he claims again that the whole thing...
Such diabolical discursiveness coerces the reader into concluding that the contaminated cook knowingly placed the defenseless "general public" at risk for HIV infection simply by doing...
Randy Shilts may change a few minds. Conduct Unbecoming submerges the reader in case histories about humiliation and injustice suffered by homosexual men and women in the U.S. armed forces. The pattern of abuse is so predictable that Shilts needs to break each story into episodes that are then staggered throughout the book. The device defers predictability and allows the author to insert repeatedly his two main points: first, that homosexuals can soldier as well as heterosexuals, and, second, that the military has always been more concerned with appearances than with reality...
...reader looking for consistency should open a jar of peanut butter rather than this screed. But as rancid gossip repackaged for national distribution, Queer in America is going to be hard to beat. Signorile learned his trade feeding items to New York City gossip columnists. He was an innuendo specialist who now touts himself as the pioneer of "outing," the distasteful practice of publicizing the private lives of homosexuals who do not feel the need to advertise what goes on in their bedrooms. By outing the famous, Signorile believes he is liberating all homosexuals from shame and guilt...
Because so much of Hang's story is in her past, Duong interweaves flashbacks with the present time. The reader must visualize the story as the grown Hang travels on a train to Moscow to visit Uncle Chinh. The technique becomes annoying in the almost immediate realization that the past is much more interesting than the present. When Hang recalls the past, she seems to do so in graphic color; the present appears bleak and bland in contrast. Perhaps Duong uses this pattern intentionally, for it correlates to her own life, in which once hopeful and passionate support of communism...