Volume 21, Number 4 · March 21, 1974
Wrestling With Fiction
By Roger Sale
Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer
by Alfred Kazin
Atlantic-Little Brown, 317 pp., $8.95
Yes, the bright book of life indeed, not just the novel, as Lawrence said, but the American novel of the last thirty years, as Alfred Kazin now says. It has all the necessary qualities of a great form gaining and sustaining its energy in an historical period, like the Elizabethan drama or the eighteenth-century satire in couplets: it is distinct, it has produced some great works, it has proven sufficiently powerful and attractive that many minor writers have been given a voice they might otherwise not have had.
Review, 2113 words
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