Word: bowens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ELIZABETH BOWEN by Victoria Glendinning. Knopf; 332 pages...
...rilled with ennui and regret that she did not make him younger, handsomer, more dashing. Finally, however, she is gracious. "As life goes on, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented," she writes. "Presumably you have learned literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can't." This disarming passage ends with a motto that also fits this modest, agreeable book. Dame Agatha recalls a plate on her nursery wall, "which I think I must have...
This year two books need no color to make them models of superlative craftsmanship and originality. In My Village, Sturbridge (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.95), Gary Bowen invents a character, True Mason, and walks him through a 19th century New England village. Bowen's style is lean and precise. But it is his and Randy Miller's brilliantly detailed wood engravings that grant My Village the aura of a rare antique rescued from some forgotten attic. David Macaulay has won an international reputation without being able to draw believable people. What he can draw-churches, cities, pyramids-he does...
...family, according to Bowen, one child usually grows up to be stronger than the parents, most of the others remain about as immature as the mother and father, and one child does not function as well as anyone else in the family. Because most people select mates with levels of emotional maturity roughly equal to their own, he says, this "weakest child" will grow up to mate with a similarly impaired adult and start the cycle over again at a more disturbed level. Says Bowen: "If we follow the lineage of the weakest child of the weakest child...
...Bowen believes, each set of parents unwittingly damages the weakest child. But the mother's role is more crucial: the weak child is usually the one with the most intense early attachment to the mother. Troubled mothers often try to control their own immaturity by using the double bind in caring for the child. Example: "Stay an infant, so I can care for you. Grow up, be a success." In an early study of schizophrenia, Bowen cited the example of a mother's way of dealing with a psychotic son: she buttered his bread, cut his meat...