Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Childhood was orphanages in Wyoming. "When Mamma died, Daddy boogied," he explains. Later he caught up with Daddy for a night, just long enough to get a signature allowing him to join the Army at 17. Before he was 20 he had a bronze star and two Purple Hearts in Korea. Smith still bears a military imprint. He is intensely patriotic. The old pistols, swords and insignia patches he sometimes sells at the Old Paris provoke a special delight. He reads war histories, likes to carry a gun and believes deeply in following procedures. Just married and out of uniform...
...daringly presented in idealistic terms, an affair the old Allen would have made a guilty joke about and passed quickly over. Now he makes some guilty jokes but stays around to explore the affair and its meaning with tenderness and concern. Gone too are the jokes about his deprived childhood in Brooklyn. Isaac Davis has, it appears, absorbed his early life; the present is oppressive enough for him to try to cope with. Even the preoccupation with the silence of God (jokey but overt) and with death are missing. We can only guess that Isaac still occasionally broods on these...
...disclosures. To Set the Record Straight adds little to history, and the jaded onlooker may be inclined to agree with Novelist Arnold Bennett that "the price of justice is eternal publicity." Still, the man justifies the autobiography. For in its pages, Sirica, 75, provides an ironic paradigm. The obscure childhood, the wayward parent, the indomitable will, the tense trials and, at last, the public recognition: we have been here before. Until 1973 that was the Richard Nixon story as told by Richard Nixon. It is not surprising that Sirica voted for him. What remains reassuring is that the judge ruled...
...contrast to Fish's tradition-heaped ways, McGuire represented the opposite end of the spectrum. From the childhood days over his parents' bar to progressive coaching with the cast of athletic psychology, the NBC color commentator pulls no punches, rejects tradition as trouble and lives by a self-concerned conviction that would make the Schlitz gustograbbers ecstatic...
DONALD BARTHELME WAS born and raised in Texas, and remains a shining example for all those unfortunates stricken with similar childhood calamities. At age 47, he is one of the most important writers in America today, published in both The New Yorker and in paperback--a rare, if dubious, achievement. Barthelme leads the so-called "comic irrealist" movement in modern fiction, which includes such lesser writers as Richard Brautigan and William Gass. But in his latest collection of short stories, Barthelme proves more adventurous than successful; stretched beyond its limits, his genre becomes tedious and inconsequential...