Word: parent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...right side of the Parthenon, so he sends her walking. Likewise, Medea's Nurse (Zoe Mulford) is looking out for her charge. Mitchell's hard-edged Creon is not exactly Heath-cliff Huxtable. But Mulford, with her sympathetic swooning and simpering, makes Mrs. Cleaver look like an absentee parent...
...double file, with six- year-old Tina somewhere in the middle. Slack-armed, she drifts sideways toward her foster mother across the rushing current of her classmates. Her eyes are scrunched up woefully in the universal expression of a sick child seeking consolation from a parent. Her ear aches, she reports. Also, her feet hurt...
...theme of children dealing with a parent's death is timeless in literature, but in danger of being rendered trite through overuse. In The Letter Left to Me, Joseph McElroy avoids cliches by developing this theme in a unique and effective manner. The novel centers on letter from a father, written a few years before his death, to his teen-aged son. McElroy's choice of plot saves his novel from becoming another repetitive reflection on dealing with death...
MCELROY writes in a first-person stream of consciousness that draws in the reader, seeming to replicate the confused and wandering form that a child's thoughts might plausibly take after a parent's death. At times the style grows annnoyingly Salinger-esque, and is peppered with italics and occasional self-conscious introspection: "And I said, `My father passed away last night.' I who of all people know enough to say 'died': yet said `passed away."' But for the most part the flow of free association is effective...
...terms with his father, and himself; he must, in short, learn to grow up, a process which lies at the heart of any father-son relationship. That process, perhaps more painful and certainly less conventionally eloquent than simple elegy, enables one to cope with the death of a parent, McElroy suggests. It also forms the basis for a well-crafted and instructive novel...