Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
A Dirty Dean and a Brazen Head
By Roger Sale
American Mischief
by Alan Lelchuk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 501 pp., $8.95
The Manticore
by Robertson Davies
Viking, 310 pp., $7.95
Fifth Business
by Robertson Davies
New American Library, 320 pp., $1.25 (paper)
The State Farm Insurance Company runs an ad on television that depicts the morning walk of Bob Warnke, State Farm agent in Cozad, Nebraska. It is predictable fantasy about a small town where the old values still hold true, where insurance men are good neighbors and not crooks, and where the barber is not trimming anyone's sideburns, moustache, or beard when he pauses to wave to his friend Bob. There is a town called Cozad in Nebraska, and undoubtedly the State Farm man there is named Bob Warnke. The ad, in that sense, is real. But it is nonetheless fantasy, hokum, and if Warnke and Cozad don't know this, State Farm and its ad agency undoubtedly do.
Review, 3131 words
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