Volume 29, Number 20 · December 16, 1982
American Graffiti
By Robert Towers
The Woods
by David Plante
Atheneum, 123 pp., $8.95
A Midnight Clear
by William Wharton
Knopf, 242 pp., $12.95
Shiloh and Other Stories
by Bobbie Ann Mason
Harper and Row, 247 pp., $12.95
A literary typologist would probably want to classify the Novel of the Sensitive Youth as a minor subdivision of the Bildungsroman—less ambitious, less philosophical, and much shorter. Though perennial, it probably reached its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s when a spate of such works appeared in this country—small, carefully wrought novels about teen-age boys or young men standing hesitantly on the threshold of adult life, full of inchoate yearnings, often troubled about their sexual identity, painfully aware of a great gap separating them from their better-adjusted, thicker-skinned peers, for whom they often felt a kind of hopeless love. William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf is perhaps the best known of the group and certainly one of the best. Now David Plante's The Woods provides evidence that the genre still lives, its tremulous sensitivity intact.
Review, 3547 words
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