Word: reader
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...clay than the immediacy and malleability of the raw material. As the show's guest curator, Hayden Herrera, points out in her warmly sympathetic catalogue essay, clay is "the oldest material for art and an emphatically primitive, even primal substance." (The first sculpture of a man, as every reader of Genesis knows, was made from clay when God modeled Adam.) Clay is earth, and Frank's figures of sprawling nudes and entwined lovers, tenderly dislocated, are clearly meant to be seen as emanations of the earth, concretions of place and appetite. On occasion her liking for the organic goes...
Once again the reader receives good value, at roughly 1½? per page, in a succession of tableaux, more or less vivants. Each represents a scene from the social history of Chesapeake...
...swamp trotters and poachers. Their interlocking fortunes and catastrophes never quite qualify for the terms "gripping" or "absorbing," but they are consistently diverting. Therein lies the author's secret: an attraction that lies not so much in the story as in a serene detachment from the story. The reader gets a four-century vacation on Olympus...
Shosha is crammed with such absolute opinions, but to enjoy the book a reader does not have to agree with them. Singer is the least didactic of writers. His attention is always on making his characters do and say diverting things. Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, Aaron's mentor and friend, has only a small role in events, but his erudite, sardonic comments add enormously to the novel's texture: "I love the Jews even though I cannot stand them. No evolution could have created them. For me they are the only proof of God's existence...
...social commentary that the situaiton offered, .44 is simply not a good book. A failure as literature, a failure as criticism of modern society, it succeeds only on the level of base, mindless entertainment--and even then, its appeal increases in geometric proportion to the blood-lust of the reader. Like In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter, .44 appeals directly to the mass murderer in each of us, that frightening corner of the soul that feels a morbid thrill each time the television announcer breaks into Edge of Night with news of some new mindless horror. But perhaps for that...