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 1999Fearing 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.
July 1979And 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.
June 1979Every 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.
March 1979Short, 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.
February 1979The 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.
January 1979Angel 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.
December 1978Old 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.
October 1978All 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.
August 1978That 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.
July 1978Different 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.
March 1978The 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.
February 1978Clowns, 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.
January 1978
