David Guy

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.

Lancelot

Book Review

Walker Percy has imagined an ideal listener for his narrative, inserted him in the novel, and allowed him to appear only through the eyes of the narrator. The novel opens — “Come into my cell. Make yourself at home. Take the chair. I’ll sit on the cot.”

Monstrosity And Beauty

Book Review

The October light in Vermont that gives the novel its title is variously seen. Lewis Hicks at one point sees it casting beauty over the landscape; James Page, in a moment of despair, believes it exposes all the world’s rottenness.

Poet Of The Ordinary: Paul Goodman Remembered

Book Review

I have made this essay personal because I find I cannot be objective about Paul Goodman. I have never fully understood what it is about the man that has so compelled me, what held in my mind the memory of those few days I saw him, what kept me searching through his works until I found access to them.

Of God And My Father

A Memoir

I sat on the couch less to read than to be enveloped in that atmosphere. I was too old, by then, to sit with him in his chair, feel the warmth of his breath on my head, smell the faint odor of his sweat, but being just a few feet away was almost as comforting.

Cain’s Fate

Book Review

Cheever’s narrative details the later history. It tells the story of the wanderer, the outcast, the man cursed from the ground. It is a story not just of the fate of Cain, but also of the society which condemns him.