Volume 25, Number 2 · February 23, 1978
Picking Up the Pieces
By Roger Sale
Refiner's Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling
by Mark Helprin
Knopf, 373 pp., $10.00
In Such Dark Places
by Joseph Caldwell
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 230 pp., $8.95
I Heard My Sister Speak My Name
by Thomas Savage
Little, Brown, 242 pp., $8.95
Natural Shocks
by Richard Stern
Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 260 pp., $8.95
Two first novels by very young writers, two others by veterans, all raise in different ways the problem of arbitrariness. In each of them I find myself reading about this person or these circumstances, then read about a quite different person or different circumstances. Why so long here, so short there, why the shift now? One usual way to create a shift that doesn't seem arbitrary is by means of story, that old device that assures us all is well, the writer knows, and will show us. If not story, then intellectual schemes, patterns, the psychology of a character, something that creates a reason for this then and that now.
Review, 3598 words
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