Word: hemingways
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...throwback. Though he is just 33, his outlook comes from a time before black humor, the roman nouveau, and the new journalism, when writers and readers believed that fiction was the ideal way to capture the essence of experience. In some respects, McGuane is a literary descendant of Hemingway. Both men are rigorous stylists; for both, reality emerges from careful, linear detail. It has been some time since a writer has acknowledged, as McGuane does, having been influenced by anything of Hemingway's except Death in the Afternoon. Possibly a change of fashion is at hand...
Young Skelton is as concerned as Hemingway was with "a good death," but he is contemporary in knowing that there is no such thing. "There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk." Still, he clings to a notion of a powerful grace born of desperation, and goes off to a rendezvous with Dance where they both know the fish will be running...
...plot that is little more than a simple, formal dance of death must be well served in the telling. McGuane brings powers of concentration to writing that recall Camus as much as Hemingway. Unlike Camus, McGuane is no thinker, but his Key West is as palpable as the Algiers of The Stranger. His prose shimmers like heat: "Thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation." Ninety-Two in the Shade is the best book yet of a very strong young writer. · Martha Duffy
...written by our fading literary heroes on the backs of envelopes and rolls of toilet paper must be exposed in a perverse invasion of privacy masked as scholarship. But what scholarship won't claim as its own, the best-seller world of business-oriented publishing frequently will. Take Ernest Hemingway's Islands in The Stream. The novel, published well after his death, has no merit whatsoever. It did, however, prove two damning points: Hemingway, suffering an unconquerable stasis, was over the hill; his widow, suffering financially, needed the money. Like Hemingway's, John Berryman's Recovery is an unfinished first...
...expresses his most exquisite right-wing rage in capital letters. A gossip columnist, a backroom politician, a muckraking Galahad of journalism -- he conjures up images of a fierce American brashness that are endearing and real. Also, and less successfully, he is an echo of a literary past, a Hemingway, a Hawthorne, a Melville, a Twain. This whole side of the book, from the first sentence ("Call me Smitty"), is an interesting diversion -- sometimes witty, but never very impressive, and little more than an academic exercise. What drives the narrative is an indefatigable love for baseball...