Volume 1, Number 6 · November 14, 1963
Upbeat
By R.W. Flint
The Island
by Robert Creeley
Scribners, 192 pp., $3.50
Writers in Revolt
edited by Richard Seaver, edited by Terry Southern, edited by Alexander Trocchi
Frederick Fell, 366 pp., $7.50
The jacket of The Island speaks of it as 'Robert Creeley's long-awaited first novel,' by which I suppose the publishers mean themselves and Creeley's friends, because it was by no means obvious from his extremely laconic poetry that he had it in him to write as sustained, coherent, and generally good a novel as The Island. The poetry would lead one to expect a novel about the trials and rewards of marriage among writers, which it is, and one would expect the same guarded, rather grim, ruminative, mutedly messianic humanism of the semi-bohemian fringes. One would expect, too, a studied choppiness of style, liberal in commas, hiatuses, hesitations, brief sunbursts of plain statement, and deep feeling—a skillfully varied, occasionally muddy, and somewhat truculent inner monologue:
Review, 1252 words
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