Volume 15, Number 3 · August 13, 1970
Pow! Now
By D.A.N. Jones
1968
by Richard Stern
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 209 pp., $5.95
The File on Stanley Patton Buchta
by Irvin Faust
Random House, 288 pp., $5.95
The Bamboo Bed
by William Eastlake
Simon & Schuster, 350 pp., $6.50
The Park
by Philippe Sollers, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith
Red Dust, 96 pp., $4.25
In one of Richard Stern's seven tales which, with two essays, make up 1968, there is a man called McCoshan, 'a gentleman out of sympathy with the times,' who drops ideas, large generalizations, at breakfast-time, when he 'uncovers for his wife the terrible configurations beneath the newspaper facts.' This is surely what Stern himself is trying to do, in what he calls 'a diverse collection commenting on contemporary life.' So are the other two American novelists under review. They trade in social problems—those newspaper constructs which travel the media of the Western world, winning votes for conservative politicians, things like Student Unrest, Law and Order, the Color Problem, Pollution, Sexual Permissiveness, the Death of God.
Review, 3677 words
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