Word: mchale
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...LADY FROM BOSTON by Tom McHale Doubleday; 304 pages...
...hero of Author Tom McHale's fifth novel is totally without redeeming social value. Dwight David Aldrich hails (of course) from Abilene, Kans.; not yet 30, he seems to have enraged everyone he has ever met. His ex-wife's prominent Boston lawyer father pays Aldrich $500 a month alimony to keep his distance-on a 500-acre retreat in Vermont. There, someone systematically blows up and burns down the "tumbledown Disney land" of a condominium that the remittance man has cynically thrown together on the site. An acquaintance Aldrich meets at a bar speaks for thousands when...
...Aldrich's thoroughgoing rascality has a point, McHale refuses to hone it. Despite Dwight David's all-American name, McHale has not turned out a parable about the national dream. Middle America comes east, all right, but the meeting produces much mutual loathing and no visible significance. Instead, McHale seems simply to have taken much joy in producing the worst imaginable main character and surrounding him with the worst imaginable supporting cast...
Teaching fellows have also been pleased. "[On-line sectioning] works just as we hoped," said John S. McHale, head teching fellow for Ec-10. "It's certainly eliminated a lot of paper work...
Though at first McHale's worst problem seems to be the exhausting narrative, the real dilemma is that for the first time he is writing about people he does not know. The crusaders, the thugs, the conmen in these pages are strangers to the author. McHale has clearly shown that he can be a dazzling extemporizer, but he badly needs familiar roots. The very restlessness demonstrated in Alinsky's Diamond may contribute to something enduring in the future. For now, though, McHale's imagination can do without this kind of exotic melodrama. > Martha Duffy