Volume 9, Number 3 · August 24, 1967
What's Your Inner Reality?
By Denis Donoghue
The Eighth Day
by Thornton Wilder
Harper & Row, 435 pp., $6.95
Snow White
by Donald Barthelme
Atheneum, 180 pp., $4.50
'In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown.' Thus Mr. Wilder begins his new novel, speaking in the voice of Truth, or History, sometimes called the omniscient author. Johnson rebuked the young Bennet Langton for thinking a story a story, 'till I shewed him that truth was essential to it.' Mr. Wilder is Johnsonian in this respect. Sometimes the narrative voice sounds like the Stage-Manager in Our Town, thirty years older, more anxious, disconsolate even when he sees the sun rising and setting in Grover's Corners, N.H. But he keeps himself out of the action. If he wants to insert a little Darwinian optimism into the story, he hires another character to do it, the local Dr. Gillies. Omniscience is prepared to comment, but only to keep the tone in order, enforcing the proper style.
Review, 2490 words
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