Word: memoirs
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Thus begins this daring and unusually complex first novel, part psychological thriller (Can Al reach his friend?), part mystery (What happened to Birdy?). It is also an extended memoir of growing up poor in the 1930s, a detailed portrait of a friendship as firm as it is unlikely and an utterly plausible account of an unbelievable obsession. In classical mythology, Daedalus made wings for a practical reason, so that he and his son could escape the labyrinth. Birdy, it turns out, has built wings too, but craved much more. In his cage, he remembers: "I'm also finding...
...world was to challenge it with one of your own making." As a boy, Crews created a country drawn from the photo graphs of models in Sears, Roebuck catalogues, and the characters he conjured up were no doubt precursors of the people who dwell in his novels. But this memoir depicts them as they truly were and situ ates them in that inexhaustible literary arena, the bitter, impoverished South...
With his hero's accident, Green transforms the novel from a typical schoolboy memoir into a remarkably mature meditation on losses and gains. He slips easily into the minds and emotions of characters around Haye: the boy's stepmother, an old nanny, the sad, slightly vulgar daughter of an unfrocked clergyman. All, in varying ways, must struggle to cope with the presence of a person to whom the intolerable has happened. He too must struggle to grow into his tragedy...
This affectionate memoir evokes a giant of great animal magnetism, who could charm a barroom full of journalists or a playground full of children. But when Schoenstein Sr. sensed injustice, he could become a horse of a different choler. Once, Ralph recalls, he and a buddy were given a summons for playing ball in Riverside Park. His father happened along, tore the ticket into bits, and growled at the cop: "For Crissake, why don't you go after [Gangster Lucky] Luciano and leave a bunch of kids alone!" The policeman crept away...
Gann would be the perfect subject for a memoir if gentlemanly reserve did not glaze over his confessions when he describes the people he has known. He gives a vivid account of how it was to see the dome of the Taj Mahal from several feet away, but is woefully reticent, for in stance, when he encounters another monument, Actor John Wayne. Chapters given to his divorce and remarriage show little more than the rough shape of a life. Only when Gann describes the drowning of his oldest son, who was chief mate on an unseaworthy tanker, does uncalculated emotion...