Word: buechner
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...FINAL BEAST by Frederick Buechner. 276 pages. Atheneum...
...Peter Cowley's faith is unshaken. Modern man, he concludes, knows too much for his own good. Too sophisticated for miracles, he must find his way to grace through such hoary maxims as "Love one another." To give that wan truism the flush of a bold truth, Novelist Buechner's drawing-room tragedy would have to glow with forthright eloquence; it shimmers with frosty, neo-Jamesian elegance instead...
Second time out, in The Seasons' Difference, he runs wide around the turns of meaning, breaks stride in the stretch and pulls up lame at the finish. As before, Novelist Buechner carries a minimum plot load, but the gravity of his theme is enough to make him stumble. He sets himself two problems that have tripped up better novelists: 1) to etch the profile of a saint without making him a prig, 2) to make a religious experience ring with the homely authority of an alarm clock...
...SEASONS' DIFFERENCE (303 pp.)-Frederick Buechner-Knopf...
Among the frisky young colts in the U.S. literary stable, 25-year-old Novelist Frederick Buechner has many of the marks of a writing thoroughbred. His style stems from Henry James, his imagination makes such plodding documentarians as Norman Mailer and James Jones look like plow horses. Critical railbirds who clocked him on his first novel, A Long Day's Dying, found that he ran a sharp race with a light package: the havoc of a love affair between a middle-aged woman and her son's English instructor...