Re: Raise High the Roof
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Tue, 07 Apr 1998 20:22:37 -0700 (PDT)
It manages to incorporate Glass tics
>-- some of them, the least distracting (though I confess that I love
THOSE
>ELEMENTS too, when I'm in that mood) -- and also be lovable and deeply
>evocative of a time and place that is long gone.
This is the one of the longer Glass stories--the others being F&Z and
Seymour: AI--that I also can come back to again and again without
getting through the first four or so pages of Buddy's narration and
saying, "Do I really feel like putting the effort into this...? I
already know what's going to happen..." Aside from the Glass tics, we
are also given a lovely ensemble that, at the moment, is most
reminiscent of the Patimkin family in Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus"...a
deeply annoying and ceaselessly amusing cast of foreign characters, each
possessing that distinctive characterization that won't let you forget
them, or ever think that you know them too well.
Aside from that, it's the most honest representation of Seymour that
Buddy has given us (besides, I'm guessing, Hapworth--which I haven't
read), and ironic that this representation is given in the absence of
Seymour's person. His journals verge on the didactic, but we aren't
allowed to dwell there long enough to cross that S:AI line where he
ceases to become a character and instead becomes a lecturer on life. In
"Carpenters", the journals are more along the lines of Holden's
monologue, where we are less concerned with what he has to say than why,
perhaps, he is saying it.
Brendan
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