Word: though
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...called the men's bar at Locke-Ober, hard by the Boston Common. Books, as distinct from best sellers, just aren't thought important, he says. He notes with disgust that even in the most literate city in North America (that's Boston), the leading paper (the Globe, though he deplores its preachiness) barely bothers to scrape together a Sunday book-review section. And justifies this lapse (says Higgins, a onetime Globe columnist) because it doesn't get enough book ads. "Does the Globe's sports section get enough ads for baseball gloves and hockey sticks? No. That's where...
...practice of law altogether. That year he published a superb second novel (16th, counting those in the Rockland dump) called The Digger's Game. If somebody isn't teaching this small marvel in writing classes, then U.S. education is in worse shape than we have been told. Probably not, though; there is an indictable villainy or two in the plot, and Higgins is pigeonholed, wrongly but irretrievably, as a crime novelist...
Higgins has since written a dozen more novels or so, and reviewers have continued to praise him, especially for his dialogue -- though with diminishing patience, as if having an uncanny ear and using it were a bit too easy. This drives the author a little crazy when he thinks about it, and he thumps down a precept that could be carved in stone: "Dialogue is character is plot." In a shrewd book published last June, On Writing, he approvingly notes that John O'Hara, a novelist he admires above almost all others, would tell a whole chapter with dialogue...
...about that talk, though? Higgins, who spent three weeks a summer in Vermont as a boy, hating every minute, flags a Vermont accent like this: "You're working for another man, you're liable, put things off. Not go through the barn today, make sure everything's all right." Which is the same way he signals a Massachusetts tough-guy accent, with that glottal comma in place of the missing "to." Is this realistic? Of course not. Does it work? Sure, because it's only a signal, to tell the reader's ear to supply an accent...
Higgins' characters jaw endlessly about politics, the law and sports, showing but never speaking of love, depression, disdain, fear. He says he'll never run out of stories, though he keeps his bar-association membership current, just in case. He loves what he does, and has never collided with writer's block. Advice to young novelists? Nothing simpler: "You're a bricklayer, you lay bricks...