Re: With Love and Squalor
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 22 Feb 1999 11:01:57 +1100
MEPIERCE wrote:
> Thanks Jim--I do appreciate your analysis--beautifully written.
>
> But I still can't feel the magic :( I am surprised by own lack of
> compassion for these characters. I promise to give the story another
> read this summer. I'm not sure I "felt the magic" of Catcher upon the
> first reading either.
>
> But now Teddy is another matter. . .
That's very odd because I've always found that prodigious badly dressed
little Zen runt the most exasperating and least interesting character in
Nine Stories, and likewise the story (although I'm rather fond of the
parents) - the Anti Bananafish with its demonic Sybil. JDS/Buddy agrees
with as much in S:AI in describing the story as `totally unsuccessful',
which I'm afraid I agree with. It's an early 50s version of the (ugh)
Celestine Prophecy books; that very disagreeable school of `Ah, I see. So
you're saying that to transcend my own state is blah blah etc etc' didactic
religious writing.
Unlike `Esme' I could find no perceivable magic, which, I think, should
always be the main thing. Writers with the most elementary of writing
skills easily surmount their more ebullient rivals if they have even the
smallest dose of this ineffable `magic'. I think that the stories I prefer
of Nine Stories are ones that *do* contain this magic, which, as I said,
seem to transcend their construction and so forth to become more than the
sum of their parts.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
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