Volume 23, Number 14 · September 16, 1976
A Family Matter
By Roger Sale
The Lardners: My Family Remembered
by Ring Lardner Jr.
Harper & Row, 371 pp., $12.95
Some Champions
by Ring Lardner, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, by Richard Layman
Scribner's, 205 pp., $8.95
The Story of a Wonder Man
by Ring Lardner
Greenwood Press, 151 pp., $10.75
In The Lardners we look—to use a phrase of John Ford's—not upon the ruins of a man but upon the ruins of those ruins. Ring Lardner's third and only living son has written a book which means to be sweet but in fact is maddeningly without any flavor at all. It may wish to seem restrained, but it is merely unstated. There is a family here, but it has neither cohesion nor the lack of it. Subjects are raised as if in a spirit of candor, but nothing is ever said, connected, explored, settled. Much seems to happen, but only seldom does anything happen to anyone. Though Lardner, Jr. seems innocent of the possibility, his family reminiscence is eloquent testimony to the way his father struck him dumb.
Review, 2549 words
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