Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
Innocents Abroad
By Jonathan Raban
J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice
by Graham Greene
Lester and Orpen Dennys (Toronto), French and English text, 69 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Monsignor Quixote
by Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, 221 pp., $12.95
One needs to go outside the usual terms of criticism to explain Graham Greene's curious eminence in modern literary culture. For Greene's heavy-lidded theological fables, half tract, half fiction, have found for themselves an enormous audience of a kind that usually has little time for either Catholicism or literature. People who never read, say, Saul Bellow are addicts of Greene, feeding their habit on a body of work that is as sour, as claustrophobically determinist, as any other writing today. Greene's novels satisfy an odd moral appetite for bitter olives and beds of nails.
Review, 3051 words
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