Word: hemenway
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Lockers Looted: A silver Swiss watch valued at $200 and $39 in cash were reported stolen from two locked lockers in the Hemenway Gym between noon and 6.35 p.m. last Saturday...
...simply a group of stories sharing a common protagonist? Is its leading man, John Everett, a modern knight errant sacrificing himself to obsolete notions of romantic love? Or is he merely a maundering hick, caroming off women who easily recognize the traits of a user? Is his creator, Robert Hemenway, an artist of light-meter sensitivity? Or is he simply a construction worker employing the worn materials of bromides and reveries...
Because all these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Hemenway, 62, provides one of the most difficult cases in modern American writing. The author's talent is unquestionable. His first collection showed fluency and wit; its title story, The Girl Who Sang with the Beatles, won the O. Henry Award in 1970. At the Border is Hemenway's first published work since that impressive debut...
When At the Border does not sound like a Billy Joel song, it displays authenticity and poignance. At his best, Hemenway has a sure sense of urban life and involvements, of apartments so tiny that even ideas have to enter single file; of affairs that begin and end on chance remarks; of yearnings for culture buried deep within the city's most anonymous dwellers. But these virtues are nearly undone by relentless mannerisms. Whenever Everett reaches an impasse, he conveniently has a dream, recollected in detail that Freud would admire. Attempts at plain speaking frequently result in a piling...
Perhaps all this was inevitable: those existential props, the Man Between and the Border, need a fresher approach than laconic narrative, no matter how charged with significance. Hemenway's best passages remain celebrations of the ordinary: meals, lovemaking, conversations with friends. For him, as for so many contemporary American writers, home is where the art is. -By Stefan Kanfer