Word: prescott
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comfortable pop sociology the book is a failure, too. The sliver of life Prescott concentrates on was small, and almost incomprehensible without being placed in some sort of context. And he makes no attempt to develop a context. He just chronicles his own activities...
...talking to Prescott offers no reassurance that the book is misleading. Though he had just written a book about being a Harvard undergraduate, he really had nothing to say about what he got out of Harvard back in the fifties, or what he thought were its most important aspects, or what he had done there. The one thing he knew was that the friends he made at school were not the most important part of the experience...
...difficult to say how accurately Prescott portrays his roommates, their activities, their problems and the general tenor of life at Harvard in the mid-fifties. Certainly his roommates--Crawford Williams and Henry Bercovic--are not just foils off which the juvenile diarist Prescott reflects himself. Rather, they have something of an existence to themselves, and they develop some momentum of their own. They might even have been the bases for almost viable characters in a first novel written 15 years ago. As it is, they are just three-dimensional oddities...
...ever before. They face a more complicated environment and have more opportunity to build themselves up or dig themselves a deeper hole than they usually imagine. Very few people are not in some way embarrassed or repentant for some of what they did to others, and it is to Prescott's credit that he shows himself and his roommates on occasion behaving incredibly tactlessly and stupidly...
...Prescott's major failing, aside from not placing his experiences as a freshman in some kind of a context, is the incredible mash he makes of sex. Evidently he was not too good at handling the business as a freshman 20 years ago, and in the interim has not made much improvement. A Darkening Green does not begin to explain the sexual problems facing his generation, all it does is show that (a) they existed (b) they obsessed Prescott perhaps 75 per cent of the time (c) they warped his approach to Harvard and (d) they made him an incredibly...