Volume 9, Number 11 · December 21, 1967
Boy's Life
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Stop-time
by Frank Conroy
Viking, 304 pp., $5.95
North Toward Home
by Willie Morris
Houghton Mifflin, 438 pp., $5.95
In our times the rate of change, and of human obsolescence, is so great that it seems quite natural that young men just past the age of thirty should publish their memoirs; and that—in Mr. Morris's case at least—those memoirs should be studded with the names of the prominent political and literary figures of our time, observed at close range and on familiar terms. Both authors, inevitably, devote most of their work to recollections of the process by which their characters were formed through childhood and adolescence; and both avoid the common clichés of accounts of boyhood, actual or fictional. Mr. Morris does not emerge from his pages looking at all like Francis Marion Tarwater; nor Mr. Conroy like Zooey Glass. Conroy does remind me a little of Stephen Dedalus; but I am not sure whether this is so because he really resembles Dedalus or because reading about him makes me feel like Leopold Bloom.
Review, 2946 words
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