Word: boyhood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...single fateful day, Fergus finds his past crowding in on him. Dead characters rise again as living hallucinations: his family, old priests, teachers, onetime loves, chance acquaintances, bygone neighbors, boyhood friends-even his boyhood self. Fergus had always justified all of his small sins for the capital gains of his novelistic art. This group of ghostly characters, convened like a kangaroo court, force him to weigh nothing less than the meaning of his life...
Years later, one boy has died and one man lives, possessed by memory. What were the voices saying? His musings ramify beyond the night swim, caught and made important by one of recollection's tricks, and now it is the whole period of his late boyhood that seems masked and mysterious...
Anyone's puzzle; everyone's novel: follow boyhood step by step, and try to fix the precise instant at which the enchanted became the ordinary. No writer solves the puzzle, which may account for its continued fascination. Novelist Paul Horgan might almost be playing with another man's board and pieces: a small dusty town in the Southwest; a sensitive young narrator who will live to be a writer; the narrator's friend, an athlete who falls to his death from the town's water tower; a rich widow who befriends the narrator and sends...
...tourists who crossed the Pedernales on a recent Sunday afternoon at the rate of one carload a minute, these are subjects in keeping with what they came to see-the severe rustic furniture, the tin drinking cups of a Texas boyhood, the hand-sewn sampler on L.B.J.'s nursery wall that says...
...lighter side of literary scholarship gives A Certain World only a small part of its total impact. Auden has involved himself in a great variety of intellectual pursuits, from his boyhood mania for lead mining to his mature infatuation with opera. They are all charted on this mental map, though music is slighted because, as the poet points out, "nothing can be said about music, except when...