Word: duggan
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MARTIN L. DUGGAN News Editor St. Louis Globe-Democrat St. Louis
...this nasty, low, mean and excellent novel, the goodfellow under scrutiny is Crandall Avery. best friend to Robert Duggan, the novel's narrator. With warm misanthropy Duggan relates their joint history: how they grazed through college together, acquired town houses that matched and wives who did not, how together they entered the hurly-burly of New York reform politics. They run for Congress-Duggan as campaign manager and Avery, of course, as candidate. As Duggan churns out press releases from a mimeograph machine in a rented hotel ballroom, .his beautiful wife is entering a suite in the same hotel...
...Duggan takes his revenge by seducing Avery's wife, and the two friends end by exchanging wives. The victory would seem to be Duggan's. Goodfellow Avery fails at politics despite open-faced dishonesty, and in the round of divorces and remarriages, Avery is clearly the loser. It is not long before he dies a ludicrous death (drunkenly, he dives into 2 ft. of water, thinking it is deep, trying to rescue a child's doll, thinking that it is a child...
...DUGGAN (167 pp.)-Richard Dougherty-Doubleday...
...Author Dougherty values irony above all other literary minerals, and the vein runs deep. Several years later, Duggan muses on the rewards of goodfellowship: how even Avery's first wife-Duggan's present one-never abandoned her warm regard for the failed politician and faithless husband. The depth of that regard is vividly apparent to Duggan as he watches his sturdy young son, born after the second round of marriages but, he realizes uncomfortably, well before Avery drowned. "He is generous with his toys, and waits his turn at the slides even when he is being cheated...