Volume 37, Number 18 · November 22, 1990
Tell, Don't Show
By Diane Johnson
Walter Winchell: A Novel
by Michael Herr
Knopf, 158 pp., $18.95
Wildlife
by Richard Ford
Atlantic Monthly Press, 177 pp., $18.95
The Screenplay: A Blend of Film Form and Content
by Margaret Mehring
Focal Press, 296 pp., $24.95 (paper)
I remember once seeing a friend's father, an elderly musician, sitting on the front porch reading the Trout Quintet, nodding and smiling over certain passages like someone rereading Persuasion, or like mathemeticians who read beautiful theorems for aesthetic pleasure. Most of us sometimes read, with the same active imaginative enjoyment, recipes or the bridge column—two short, short dramatic forms. Sometimes these short works are in a different or compressed language, like the Trout, or like the passage in front of me: 'w. m. p.1, up 1 p.3 = k.6, p.6, rpt. from *,' which allows my mind to run along to the finished sleeve. Michael Herr's recent book Walter Winchell is, as he tells us in a preface, 'unashamedly' a screenplay, that is, an abbreviation related to a film as the knitting instruction to the sleeve; while awaiting the realization, the mind can take pleasure in the short form, pregnant as it is with suggestion. The screenplay may even be the work at its best, perfection immanent, to be perfected by the reader's imagination.
Review, 3583 words
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