Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives him an advanced course in the three Bs: boredom, bullying and befuddlement...
Suspended Sensibilities. But back home during summer vacation, Jimmy finds that the subjects of those slides shrink, blur and become distorted. He half realizes that he is beginning to see old friends, new cars, his father and the N.Y. Yankee., through the eyes of an English schoolboy. He decides that the world of tea and Sopworth isn't so bad after all-until his re-entry into it, when he is buffeted more harshly than ever. Crikey! Now his sensibilities are hopelessly suspended somewhere in mid-Atlantic...
...Wilfrid Sheed. "When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...
Sheed has already disclosed in a prologue what all this leads to. In later life, James Bannister becomes owner and resident propagandist of two right-wing radio stations in California. Aloof and "Eastern" in the West, he fervently eulogizes his conception of a departed America while railing against English decadence in an incurable English accent. But Sheed's tale is more than an ironic pathology of the right-wing mind, more, even, than a wry diagnosis of a severely fractured nationality. It also captures the comic anguish of a youth who begins to understand himself just at the moment...
...mixture in all this of English and American, humorous and serious, is what gives Sheed's writing its characteristic texture. His crisp craftsmanship seems to come from the English satirical tradition, but beneath this veneer the American grain runs deep: he knows his way intimately around the moral and physical landscape of the U.S. middle class. Sheed relishes the ridiculous but champions the sane and normal. His protagonists are ordinary guys desperately trying to fend off the world's idiocies and evils long enough to define themselves and do the decent thing. They rarely succeed completely. Solitary Baseball...