Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979
In Extremis
By Robert Towers
Birdy
by William Wharton
Knopf, 310 pp., $8.95
The Cement Garden
by Ian McEwan
Simon and Schuster, 153 pp., $8.95
Probably no fictional subject is truly exhaustible. The writers of these impressive first novels have both taken the time-honored (if not time-worn) material of adolescent maladjustment and pushed it—pushed it far beyond the experience or even the most vagrant fantasies of an endearingly troubled Holden Caulfield. Both novels are truly fictional, made objects rather than disguised case histories, and they both display a loving precision in their documentation of the extreme.
Review, 1953 words
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