Word: first-person
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Means of Liberation. At this point Mrs. Gray abruptly switches from the first-person "I" narrative form that has preserved whatever degree of credibility the story maintains. Stephanie in the third person, Stephanie as "she," makes fairly ludicrous fiction. She turns up, not drowned but hinting darkly at the presence of terminal cancer, tooting around the Southwest with a genial young homosexual whom she patronizes, mothers and seems to be weaning away from a fear of feminine flesh. Meanwhile she scribbles notes to her husband and communes with herself about nurturing and whether women can ever be happy free...
...this bright, vain man is diverting. Not many people are truly fond of banks, or of prisons, and it is fun to watch Sutton deflate their institutional dignity. It would be even more fun if he spoke with his own voice. Unhappily, his book is one of those first-person ghostwriting dilutions that make Masaichieftains, subliterate footballers, and Brooklyn bank robbers sound as if they were serving ten years to life in journalism school...
...true of Mother Jones articles, but the advocacy journalism sometimes hides other biases. For example, Burlingham says some people view the utility rates drive in Arkansas as "one step toward public ownership and control of the power industry." In the very next line, the writer interrupts his narrative--the first-person traumatic journalist angle is a constant problem with the magazine--to say, "(I do not mean to suggest, however, that their real purpose in promoting lifeline is to take over the utilities. The issue's popularity reflects the situations of the groups which have adopted it. Most are large...
...excerpt reads like a political memoir, with all the characteristic flaws of that genre: first-person approach, great emphasis on the writer's own role, slightly wooden style, exaggeration of the bits of history the writer happens to know about first-hand. And even if a little positive revisionism on Johnson-particularly about his role in civil rights--might be a good thing, knowing that his Vietnam policy stemmed from his relationship with his mother seems, in the end, only to trivialize what happened there...
...value of this book's subject matter, however, is sufficient to compensate for its shaky literary organization. Despite the difficulties that the Schecters experienced in penetrating Soviet society, and perhaps because of them, this book is valuable as a record of first-person accounts of the Soviet experience. It goes beyond the standard platitudes about the Soviet Union to provide at least a frustrated peek at Russian life...