Word: bell
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bloody Welts. Only the referee had it close at the final bell after twelve rounds...
...BELL CALL by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 317 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...tendentious grounds that he hasn't yet asked to go? Permit children to defecate on the floor, Or break up the chairs in a rented, furnished house? Even the most dogmatically permissive parent or psychologist would certainly draw the line. Yet Tarl Pracket, the strange antiheroine of Bell Call, brings up her children just like that-and such is the hallucinatory power of the author that for brief instants Tarl even seems to have a valid case...
Though the novel is told mostly from the viewpoint of a middle-aged widower (and sometimes, coyly, by his wife's ghost), the central figure of Bell Call is Tarl, who is obsessed by her belief in total freedom for herself and her four children. Author Ashton-Warner has written urgently before this about the necessity of freedom in the education of young minds. "How glorious," she wrote in Teacher, "are the dirty spoilt children, never held up with fear!" But Tarl carries the idea beyond conviction to monomaniacal compulsion. "Her voice is soft with faith. Tomorrow...
Fighting such rebellious material, Author Ashton-Warner's celebrated style -a vibrantly sentient torrent of present-tense sentences and fragments-shows signs of becoming an intrusive mannerism. Bell Call has an even worse flaw...