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FICTION: Cannibals and Missionaries. Mary McCarthy∙Endless Love, Scott Spencer ∙Letters, John Barth∙ McKay's Bees, Thomas McMahon∙Sophie's Choice, William Styron∙The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth ∙The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Editors' Choice | 10/22/1979 | See Source »

...when the McKay expedition sets out, the West seemed a welcoming, fertile frontier. McMahon so skillfully intertwines fact and fiction that the experience of his protagonist is not merely typical; it is vivid, and exacting, and the two strands are often hard to sort out from one another...

Author: By Katherine P. States, | Title: The Real McKay | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

...Thomas McMahon choose less domineering figures to make his entrance into historical fiction. McKay himself, the owner of the bees, was a contemporary of this crowd, though not of the same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life...

Author: By Katherine P. States, | Title: The Real McKay | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

...McMahon ties his characters up in a web of natural images, emphasizing their closeness to the land and wilderness: "The sun stings Catherine's shoulder, a dark yellow bee...She felt her heart being eaten from below the way a tomato is eaten when it brushes the ground...Enthusiasm spread like a disease bacillus in a kissing game...Cows moved slowly over the fields crossing the veins of tiny streams, like white worms on a leaf." This fertility of his imagery becomes explicitly sexual in a young man's sense of spring...

Author: By Katherine P. States, | Title: The Real McKay | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

...McMahon's pen falls into the hands of his characters--his descriptions enhance their moods, drawing natural parallels to their conflicts...

Author: By Katherine P. States, | Title: The Real McKay | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

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