Word: boye
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...must deal with pressing issues ranging from minority faculty hiring to admission of Asian-Americans. Now, the Corporation has two empty seats it can use to bring in a woman or minority and end its existence as an all-white male committee made up of representatives from the old boy network...
...birth mothers. Some foster families end up taking in the birth mothers too, when they become too weak to care for themselves; some remain ambivalent. "I always felt sympathy for her, until the night they put him in intensive care," says the foster mother of an 18-month-old boy with ARC. % "They told me that if his breathing got any worse they'd put him on a respirator, and at that moment I hated...
...novel is an enveloping glimpse into the soul of a teenaged boy baffled by the effects of death on his mind and world. McElroy's drifting, almost careless stream of consciousness adds credence to his hero's words. The reader is drawn into the boy's mind, and follows his leaps from bemusement to reminiscence to stark realization of death's actuality. What began as an elegy for the father develops into a journal documenting the son's progression into maturity even as the letter progresses into wider and wider circles of society...
McElroy's achievement is to move beyond elegy, which is the conventiopnal stance of books about the death of loved ones. Just as the letter ends up by cerating a distance between the boy and his father, as written words are want to do, so too an elegaic novel would only add to that distance...
...boy must come to terms with his father, and himself; he must, in short, learn to grow up, a process which lies at the heart of any father-son relationship. That process, perhaps more painful and certainly less conventionally eloquent than simple elegy, enables one to cope with the death of a parent, McElroy suggests. It also forms the basis for a well-crafted and instructive novel...