Volume 16, Number 12 · July 1, 1971
Clowns
By V.S. Pritchett
Love in the Ruins
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 403 pp., $7.95
Being There
by Jerzy Kosinski
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 142 pp., $4.95
The hero as the clown. It is not a new idea, but it can be given a new twist if he is sick and if the 'normal' world is more absurd, more dangerous, and sicker than he is. That sickness comes from the normal man's refusal to face the facts; the clown's sickness comes from a morbid awareness of them. Having gone through so much he is clever and stoical. He pesters himself to the point of laughter. After all, he is the comedian of the clinic; and, in Walker Percy's novels, the clinic is sex-mad, science-mad, pleasure-mad contemporary life.
Review, 1764 words
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