Word: hersey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHITE LOTUS by John Hersey. 683 pages. Knopf...
...about John Hersey. He asked for the silver tongue; he was given the golden touch. He longed to write great novels that would endure for centuries; he has written magnificent volumes of journalism that make the Book of the Month Club. Into the Valley and Hiroshima are classics of reportage. All Hersey's best novels (A Bell for Adano, The Wall, A Single Pebble) are lightly fictionalized feature stories lifted from current history. His worst novels (The Marmot Drive, The Child Buyer) are nonjournalistic creations of an uncreative imagination. But even in the bad novels Author Hersey has always...
Well, he made it-partly because he is John Hersey, partly because the book encapsules an acute contemporary controversy in an ingenious historical allegory. The controversy is the race question, and the allegory supposes that millions of white Americans are forced to experience what millions of black Americans have experienced during the last two centuries. The reader is invited to see how the whites like it and to conclude that turnabout is unfair play...
...sole action of the play is a state senatorial inquiry into a case of child buying, in which a parade of witnesses relate their roles in the affair. This woe fully static device comes down to describing the play that isn't there. Along the way, Shyre and Hersey plunk paper bullets into pre-perforated targets-the jargon of educationists, the corrupting TV-loot mentality, the jingoistic powerelites of government, business and education. There is one brief moment of absurdly human pathos when the boy himself (Brian Chapin) agrees to go with the child buyer in the hope that...
...Shyre-Hersey play is admirably animated by human decency. It falters because it cannot credit other humans with a like will and decency to resist the pervasive wiles of the inhumane...