Word: mcelroy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HIND'S KIDNAP by Joseph McElroy. 534 pages. Harper...
...Joseph McElroy's startling first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, was about a man trying to invent a world and then smuggle himself into the lives of his invented and remembered populace. In the author's second novel, Hind's Kidnap, the protagonist is obsessed by the search for a kidnaped four-year-old child, as well as a hunt for clues to his own early background, and the attempt to dekidnap himself and all his friends who have been stolen away from their childhood into an adopted adulthood. The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result...
...exploration of himself. Hind, self-consciously tall at 6 ft. 7 in., does not know his own parents and was brought up by a guardian whose strict moral precepts still order his life. Perhaps this is why Hind gradually comes to think of himself as the savior of what McElroy calls the "placental" city. Hearing the police emergency siren, Hind "imagined vehicles fading to the side to give way, his own long arms stretching over the heights and depths of the city to whatever injured or dead or suicidal person or persons the truck was going...
...requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed. Along the way, it is often difficult to see de Forrest for the trees -even with, or from, what McElroy calls "Hind's height...
...feels lost without her own well-worn pillow. "I'm messy," says Carol, "and so is she." Don Denzin and James Sherry found companionship in a mutual appreciation of Thoreau's Walden and a joint jam session-Don on clarinet, Jim on guitar. Carol Tucker and Lynn McElroy were delighted by the matching because, as Carol explains it, "we're built the same and are both outdoorsy." That already has led to tennis-playing fun on double dates...