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