Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fascination of his brother's memories lies in the fact that the sum of detail never accounts for the man and if John Faulkner furnishes few of the portentous correlations between literature and life that are the delight of graduate students, he splendidly evokes the flavor of boyhood in a small Deep Southern town surprised by the turn of the century...
Anyone who thinks he has read all this before will be right. But no one should therefore write off Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree as just another fictional recollection of an all-American boyhood. For Newt Winger is a Negro. His graduation ceremony is segregated, and the defeated bully (another Negro) is driven to his death by a white cop. His brother-in-law is a dangerous drunk who loads a shotgun whenever he gets loaded himself, and blazes away at the sky shouting "I'm gonna blow the ass off Jesus Christ, the long-legged white...
...fable for two-the cruel cat of collective human conformity endlessly toying with the mouse of an individual's deformity. But Grass has set the jaws of his literary mousetrap much wider than that. Just as a straight chronicle of the sometimes nasty habits and high hopes of boyhood, his story should become a minor classic like Kipling's Stalky & Co., Alain Fournier's romantic pre-World War I The Wanderer, and John Knowles's A Separate Peace. No one, at any rate, excels Grass in one prerequisite for writing about adolescence...
Several minor characters give excellent performances. Robert Blackburn as Mickey, a prize fighter who loved and left Ella, is marvelously cocky, and provides most of the few light moments of the evening. Jim Spruill, as a boyhood friend of Jim, is successful in conveying the differences between the races--the joviality of the Negroes, the awkardness of the whites--O'Neill seeks to establish in the first two scenes. Bradley Marable as Jim's mother is also excellent, delivering the line "Dey ain't many strong. Dey ain't many happy neider" with moving compassion...
...true that he worked his way through the University of Illinois, but generally Swede and I had a pretty carefree time in our teens. The point is, the Nelson Algren I grew up with had an ordinary boyhood without hunger, fear or deprivation. He's a great writer without the hoked-up background...