Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973
Where the Wolf Howls
By Michael Wood
Heartbreak Tango
by Manuel Puig, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Dutton, 224 pp., $6.95
Other Men's Daughters
by Richard Stern
Dutton, 244 pp., $6.95
Ninety-Two in the Shade
by Thomas McGuane
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 197 pp., $6.95
The Obscene Bird of Night
by José Donoso, translated by Hardie St. Martin, translated by Leonard Mades
Knopf, 438 pp., $7.95
Modern styles are confessions of failure, point helplessly to a world which, in the end, eludes the writer. Kafka's baffling directness, Joyce's infinite ingenuity; Mann's lifelong impersonation of a boring old codger; the raveled syntax of Proust and James, that interminable prose which always seems to find room for one more quibbling clause: all these styles are wonderfully eloquent and successful confessions, but what they confess is a failure to make language reach right up to the world. The idea of the mot juste has died on us, because no words are entirely right any more.
Review, 4058 words
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