Volume 3, Number 5 · October 22, 1964
Domestic Manners
By Frederick C. Crews
Drive, He Said
by Jeremy Larner
Delta Paperback, 192 pp., $1.95
Teeth, Dying And Other Matters
by Richard G. Stern
Harper & Row, 288 pp., $4.95
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
by John Cheever
Harper & Row, 288 pp., $4.95
Most serious writers who work from an experience outside the main areas of strife in our society find themselves adopting an attitude of weary sarcasm toward the blandness of present-day American life. The irony of these three style-conscious books seems directed largely against their authors' own innocence—innocence of history, innocence of tragedy—and their need for special mannerisms of style and plotting seems to grow from the absence of any compelling theme; compare, to take an extreme example, the awful simplicity of Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just.
Review, 1771 words
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