David Guy

Old Master

Book Review

What most impresses me about the work of V.S. Pritchett is its stunning variety. I am faced with the question that often arises in confronting a substantial artist: how can he know all that he does? Each story is unique in its characters, techniques, its tone: each creates its own small peculiar world. “Blind Love,” the title story of an earlier volume, and the third story in this one, deserves special mention.

All That Glitters

Book Review

American Gold is a book full of poetry, a book of history, the story of a place as it changes through fifty-eight years, the history of the shaping of a sensibility. It is not quite a novel. But it is a book worth having.

That Little Guy In The Corner Needs A Drink

Book Review

His novels are often wildly funny, with a kind of humor that is even more striking on a second reading, once it has had time to sink in. He is not the life of the party, but the enormously funny little man off in the corner whom only a few people know about.

Different Drummers

Book Review

Brother to a Dragon Fly is first and foremost the story of Joe Campbell, but as the book proceeds, it seems to become a history of the civil rights movement. Will Campbell’s unadorned style is at its most effective when reciting those events both moving and terrifying.

The Hero Is Reason

Book Review

Stout’s was a remarkable life, in many ways a model one, yet it would hardly have been noted, much less remembered, if not for the series of detective novels that he began writing in his forty-seventh year.

Clowns, Poets, Priests

Book Review

Those who approach Journal of Rehearsals hoping to find a familiar figure will discover a deeper, fuller portrait than they had expected. Fowlie’s most moving pages deal not with the professor, the writer, the literary figure, but with the inner man who traces himself so unerringly back to the child.

Beyond Portnoy

Book Review

It is a novel about the nature of temptation itself, in all its guises. Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to resist temptation is to succumb to it, but his witticism contains a truth, because even if we do resist temptation it continues to loom, to grow, as a threat, ever returning, dominating our lives.

A Childish Ignorance

Book Review

Farther Off from Heaven concerns William Humphrey’s own loss of paradise. Paradise is not necessarily an idyllic place — it only seems so, by the light that our own consciousness casts over it — and Humphrey’s was an ordinary town named Clarksville, in Texas.

A Simple Answer

I have never quite grasped the believer’s certainty. In the church of my youth there was a massive organ which shook the sanctuary with music too complicated for me to understand.

Loose Change

Book Review

What perhaps saves the book, makes the bulk of it interesting and entertaining, if not profound, is Davidson’s remarkable honesty. She does not flinch from the most embarrassing and painful details, even in her own life.