David Guy
David Guy’s book reviews appear regularly in the Washington Post and the New York Times. He is the author of several novels, including The Autobiography of My Body and Football Dreams. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
— From July 1999A Different World
The Sexual Politics of Ursula Le Guin
There is much to admire in these novels beyond the brilliance of their central conceptions. Their style is vivid but simple, utterly unpretentious, with the kind of transparency that reveals ideas in all their clarity. I can’t remember when I have done reading that is so satisfactory on an emotional level — telling a story I want to hear — and also on an intellectual level, provoking hours of thought beyond what the books even dealt with.
December 1984He Took The Doorknob With Him
Book Review
The real drama of his life took place as he entered the almost monastic study of his mansion — when he closed the door, he took the doorknob with him — and wrote with a creative fury that few other artists can even imagine. Even he was so busy as to hardly notice what he was doing, but in brief moments of repose he was aware of it.
March 1981Poet Of The Ordinary
Book Review
Yet the mansion of fiction has many rooms, and enough of even its greatest writers do not fit our preconceived molds. Goodman was not that streetcorner babbler, wrapped up in remembered and invented anecdote, but a thinker, an observer, a contemplator.
January 1981And Endless Sorrow
Book Review
There is an immense sadness to this book, especially at the end, but it is a sadness that is squarely faced and thus in a sense overcome. It is the sadness that the past inevitably has, that these things happened and those did not, a life was given to this and not to that, a happiness that seemed available was not achieved. It is a sadness that the reality of our lives always has, but to find it expressed with such clarity and poignance in a work of art is rare.
December 1980Mrs. Reilly And Her Little Ignatius
Book Review
A Confederacy of Dunces is most triumphantly a symphony of voices, a wonderfully wide range of authentic-sounding voices which would be distinctive even if they were never named.
November 1980Back From The Dead And Goofy As Ever
Book Review
Characters in the novels of Anne Tyler are imprisoned by people, places, things, by the whole fabric of their past lives, but they dream — some of them — of escaping. Their means of escape is through other people. They envision in the other a life more like the one they want to lead, and their decisions to change are sudden.
September 1980The Poor In Spirit, And The Rich
Book Review
Dr. Fischer is a dark God who grants us favors only at the cost of our humiliation, who eggs us on with snatches of happiness only in order to degrade us. He is a greedy God, as greedy as his creatures: he is greedy for our humiliation.
July 1980Wrinkled Little Man With Sad Eyes
Book Review
The mature work of Somerset Maugham is nothing if not honest. It moves on the weight of his blunt, plain sentences, which he delivers to the reader like so many body blows.
June 1980Juanderful
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.
November 1979And 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.
October 1979Menace 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.
September 1979Means 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.
August 1979
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