Word: godwin
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...Voice of One's Own reads like a sorority yearbook. Admittedly, the sorority is a distinguished one. Pearlman and Henderson had the good fortune to interview such luminaries as Amy Tan. Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin, Mona Simpson, Alice McDermott, M.F.K. Fischer and Louise Erdrich. They interviewed 28 women in all, striving, they explained, for a generational, regional and ethnic cross-section. Reading this book, however, we do not get the sense of the writers' differences. Pearlman and Henderson work entirely too hard to draw connections between the writers, and even harder to draw connections between themselves...
...interviewers' blatant fawning frequently makes the interviews seem trivial and stilly. Many of the women are interviewed in their homes or in cozy little cafes near their homes and Pearlman and Henderson spare no words communicating the picayune domestic details of their surroundings. Their voyeuristic glee at seeing Godwin's indoor pool or overhearing one of Fischer's personal telephone conversations is embarrassing. Italics and exclamation points abound. The opening paragraph of Pearlman's interview with Erdrich is only one salient sample...
FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER by Gail Godwin (Morrow; 404 pages; $21.95). Margaret Gower is six on the day (Sept. 13, 1972) she comes home from school to learn that her mother has abandoned her and her father Walter, the rector of St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church in the small Virginia town of Romulus. The mother has gone away with Madelyn Farley, a college friend who spends a night with the Gowers on her way back from a summer-theater job (she is a set designer) to her home in New York City. The bereaved daughter and her father, who periodically...
Margaret's long, leisurely narration, which takes her up to age 22, constitutes a test of this assertion. In the end she chooses good manners, in the old-fashioned sense, over assertiveness, generosity over self-absorption. Grace, both divine and human, seems worth preserving. Those who encourage Gail Godwin to include more nastiness, more hard-edged portraits of evil in her novels, have missed the point that this one, her eighth, makes again: it can be just as heroic, and as aesthetically rewarding, to be nice as it is to be horrid...
...indict up to a dozen defense contractors, consultants and former Pentagon officials for fraud. Moreover, budgetary pressures will force the nation's No. 1 shopper to prune as much as $400 billion from purchases over the next five years. One indication of how difficult the job can be: Richard Godwin, the first man to hold it, quit after only a year...