For what it's worth:
"These disappointments are more
than made up for by the great delight of rediscovering an old
favorite and finding I like it more than I ever did--because
now I'm far better equipped to appreciate the author's
excellences. It seems to me that every time I return to John
O'Hara and Somerset Maugham I discover new evidence of their
enormous craft. Years ago I read their novels and short
stories for several reasons--for sheer story value, to make
the acquaintance of their characters, and for what light
their auctorial intelligence could shed upon such matters as
Life and Truth and Beauty.
I still read them for these
reasons, and get more out of them than I ever did. But at the
same time I am more aware now of the manner in which they
achieve particular effects. I observe, while caught up in the
story of _The Moon and Sixpence_, say, how Maugham wields the
perspective of his narrator like a conductor's baton. Reading
_Ten North Frederick_ for the fifth or sixth time, I am no
less caught up in the inexorable decline of Joe Chapin for my
noticing how O'Hara uses the viewpoints of various characters
to reveal facets of his protagonist."
I've never read O'Hara myself, but I certainly respect
Block's opinion.
G.
===== George C. Upper III, Editor The Lightning Bell Poetry
Journal http://www.lightningbell.org/
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 05 Aug 2002 EDT