Word: lamkin
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...there is a play surrounding Mr. Scott. It is not bad fun, either, since lively and emphatic family spats are going on almost all the time. However, except for Mr. Scott's setpiece, Comes a Day is badly contrived and badly phrased. Speed Lamkin wrote it, but he appears to have had a good deal of unwitting help. See if you can match up the elements from Comes a Day in Column A below with the plays in which these elements have previously appeared (Column B).* Column A Column B 1. Mother slaves away all day to support her family...
Thomas Hal Phillips is a novelist, a Southerner, and 28. There stops all resemblance between Phillips and the decay-under-the-magnolias school of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Speed Lamkin. The South of Novelist Phillips, like the South of reality, is composed of ordinary people, good & bad, with the same feelings and frustrations as people anywhere else. His characters are no more decadent and perverse than folks in Idaho or Kansas, even though life does unroll with some regional twists...
...Speed Lamkin still has much to learn about writing. But at 22 he has already mastered one of the writer's fundamental implements: the ability to understand motives and desires of many kinds of people...
Oddly, for a young novelist, Lamkin has put his story in the words of a middle-aged man. Henry has grown up with the Richardsons, as one of their "poor cousins." All his life he has lived in the double shadow of the Richardson grandeur and his own mother. In a languid, casual prose that reflects his own insipidity, Henry tells his cousins' story, while he himself is changing from an absolute disciple of the noble Richardson myth to a disillusioned old bank clerk who decries its "false majesty...
Technically, the novel is weak. The loose, rambling prose does out take hold of the reader until the genuinely rich plot begins to move by itself. Lamkin falls to take advantage of the dramatic situations he has devised, and much too often he uses the hack writer's crutch of divulging information about one character through the lips of another. It is true that this indirectness of style produces a wispy, unrealistic effect that is appropriate to the subject matter, but at times it becomes apparent that Lamkin does not yet know how to explain a character's motives effectively...