Volume 29, Number 10 · June 10, 1982
Shyster Saints
By Robert M. Adams
Take Five
by D. Keith Mano
Doubleday, 582 pp., $17.95
Dutch Shea, Jr.
by John Gregory Dunne
Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 352 pp., $15.95
The hero as foulmouth is evidently a side effect of the new American middle-class puritanism, which thrives on being nonjudgmental verbally and is prissy on every topic except sex. So appalling is the unctuous discourse of everyday life, it is no wonder the novelists turn, through their protagonists, toward a vocabulary of obscenity and insult. The problem is once you've set up your profane and blasphemous hero, what do you do with him? An apparent solution—not particularly happy, but perhaps the best available—is to discover beneath his rough and bristling exterior that old cornball standby, the heart of gold. One is half ashamed even to mention it. Here we are creeping up on the twenty-first century, and we have nothing to fall back on except a convention that was hackneyed in the sixteenth.
Review, 2232 words
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