Word: reader
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...Greene. That is not exactly news. And it is only a mixed blessing for Greene's characters, who in his new novel go through more than the usual torments that may or may not be signs of God's devastating love. But what an indulgence for the reader. Temporarily, at least, everybody can sidestep this fall's avalanche of novels-many of them apparently the work of rude boys rubbing sticks together to make fire-and enjoy a Promethean storyteller at work...
...splendid set of peripheral bit players first reach the reader, filtered through the ironic mind of Dr. Plarr. His own bereaved mother, living on sweet cakes and self-pity in Buenos Aires. Romantic Novelist Jorge Julio Saavedra, author of The Taciturn Heart, whose machismo-marinated works are timeless and thus lifeless as well. A British ambassador who begins to sense the sheer outrage of U.S. imperialism when he finds that the embassy cook automatically fries his eggs Yankee style. Fortnum's wife Clara, who is (yes) a graduate of Madame Sanchez's immaculate brothel and the object...
...reported that both men had freely confessed-in a manner that sounded reminiscent of Stalin's farcical purge trials of the '30s -to various acts against the state. In what seemed an attempt by the authorities to discredit Solzhenitsyn, their testimony supposedly described him as a sympathetic reader of a banned underground newspaper...
...accused - and acquitted - of conspiring to obstruct justice in inves tigating the facts of the police raid, in which the killings were presented as "self-defense." Arlen surrounds his tri al narrative with the atmospherics of Chicago. But it is mostly offhand, as if Arlen knows, as the reader knows, that Mike Royko has done Richard Daley better and Norman Mailer got Chica go down much better five years...
...eralized truth. "Michael Tabor," he writes of one defendant, "had an intensity that overrode mere precedents; by mere presence, now and then un abashedly malign, he enforced the illusion that the insulted had come to vengeance." The language is accurate enough in its grand way, but eventually the reader cares less about the defendants than about the author, gesticulating here and there in a peculiar kind of 18th century jive...