Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Remember Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird? Atticus risked his life to try to save Tom Robinson, which ultimately, he failed to do. Jewison loved that movie, so he made a sequel...
Another serious touch is the tenderness of Kirkland's grandfather, Sam, the guiding force in the young lawyer's life. At one point, Kirkland tells his grandfather's friend, "You know if he (Sam) goes. I don't know what I'd do." But Jewison chooses an odd route of saving us from this terrifying conclusion--he never mentions Sam again...
What, indeed, is the point of all this? Why does Abe depict people as freaks and reduce their motivations to a series of mechanical and sexual impulses? If, as the author once said, this novel is "a parable of city life," then it appears that we are a society of sick helping the sick. Abe, who holds a medical degree but has never practiced, breaks all human relations down into physician-patient relationships where, as "the horse" acknowledges, "Doctors are cruel, and patients endure their cruelty...that's the law of survival." It is not an appealing view of human...
...protagonist returns this time as Walter F. Starbuck, and he is a Harvard man. He is so much a Harvard man, in fact, that were Vonnegut less obvious in writing his titles this book might well be called Kilgore Trout Goes to Harvard. Vonnegut's hero still peacefully accepts life's highs and lows, but Harvard has changed him: the lows seem a little lower, the highs a little higher, and the accepting a little harder...
Both types of Vonnegut fans--the groupies who thrive on Vonnegut's simplistic reductions of life's problems into phrases like "So it goes," and those who go for his one-of-a-kind style and sarcastic commentary on life in the U.S.--will come away from Jailbird more than satisfied. And if the reader hails from within Harvard's ivy-covered walls, the sense of fulfillment will no doubt prove even more complete--Jailbird is not just another of the current rash of "life after Harvard" novels. Instead, it clearly portrays the vast dichotomy between the way the world...