Word: walks
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...Down the colonnade that is called the President's Walk . . . there awaited him a highball, . . . two soap-smelling, be-diapered grandsons. . . ." (TIME...
...congealed in Stockton's four corners, yelling at the Negro women, asking them "How would you like to have this [rope] around your neck?" Terrified Lillian Blake promised to lead them to her man's hiding place. Someone pointed out that the two women, both barefoot, could walk faster if they were shod. A committee crowded into a store to buy shoes...
...Walk Like a Mortal is the story of ten quietly crucial months, some year in the '20s, in the life of 17-year-old Gabe Mackenzie. It gains no little through a fact sparsely precedented in U. S. fictional adolescence : that its hero is neither a Harold Teen, a neuraesthete, nor a tragicomic boob, but merely an intelligent, quite normal high school student...
Most notably, he has seen the break-up of his parents' stale marriage, complete with quarrels, cruelties, grandmotherly interference, his own tortured and split allegiance. He has seen his mother walk out with a hollow, sad character named Charlie Cobden. He and his father have left their dead apartment to live with Uncle Henry and a menagerie of individualistic cousins, and there Gabe has had his first taste of vigorous family living. He has seen his father, who had been a kindly, negligible ghost, take on resonance and certainty. He has seen his hard mother break down and abjectly...
...best, though, good literature must approach absolute perception, fused with absolute statement. Walk Like a Mortal, engaging though it is, cannot and wisely does not try to lay claim to either. Its perceptions are safe and uncritical. It is nicely written: yet it would be hard to find a definitive sentence in it. In appraisal of talented Dan Wickenden it is instructive to recall another book by and about another young man; James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (see p. 86). Joyce could never have written Walk Like a Mortal: even...