David Guy

Juanderful

Book Review

In either case — whether Goodman believed he had finally been accepted and could really pull out all the stops, or whether he sensed the dangers of success and wanted to warn people off — Don Juan is Paul Goodman at the height of his powers.

And Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You Are

Book Review

The Ghost Writer ends in a punchline, so it must have been a comedy. . . . Yet it was the reader’s impression through most of the novel that he was deeply absorbed in serious problems of art, and character, and relationships among people. Philip Roth’s writing at its best is characterized by just this deft touch, a blend of high seriousness with sometimes light, sometimes broad comedy.

Menace Around The Edges

Book Review

Thus the Bowles who held our attention with striking and almost mythical action in the early stories holds it toward the end in more subtle ways.

Means Of Survival

Book Review

Though Sophie’s Choice handles larger themes — the nature of evil itself, for instance, which Styron examines through the literature of the holocaust — it is really a book about guilt, in particular, the guilt of survivors.

Fearing Life, Writing Lives

Book Review

The style in which William Dubin the biographer writes, in which he speaks, and in which this novel about him is largely written, is detached and often ironic. Dubin is obsessed with lives and the lessons they impart.

And Some Not So Good

Book Review

The reader is perhaps three or four stories into the volume before he realizes the significance of the title; the volume for the most part concerns a group of people who knew each other at graduate school in Ann Arbor in 1960. They are gifted intellectuals, who expect great things from themselves and their friends, and the book is about the sad reality that they actually face. 

Every Man An Island

Book Review

Then one day on the street he sees a “stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress”; astonishingly, it is the girl from the days of his youth: it is Hartley. Charles has retired to contemplate his dead past, and the past has risen up to greet him.

Short, Fat And Dumb With Numbers

Book Review

One great virtue of a work like The Realists is that it acts as a guide through the works of these writers, and whets the reader’s appetite. One would not think to call their lives happy — as Snow points out, a “great writer has to live with the worst side of his nature as well as the best” — but they were full and rich.

The World According To Irving, Garp, Bensenhaver

Book Review

John Irving has laid his cards on the table. From what seemed to be the beginning of a long realistic chronicle, he has moved into a world of fantasy, symbol, and wild humor, and for the rest of the novel he settles into neither world, but shuttles back and forth between the two.

Angel At The Gate

In the year I was sixteen, on the first day of that new year, my father died, and since that time I have longed hopelessly for a paradise that will never return.