Word: prescott
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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...
...substance of this journal-and-commentary that makes the enterprise objectionable, and not just the from alone. The form is strained, ungraceful and disjointed, but if the substance were not quite so vapid, strained and lacking in grace, perhaps the book would be passably tolerable. If Prescott should be locked up, it is not for the book he has written--which is not that bad. Rather, he should go for the life he has led--for from the pages of A Darkening Green it appears to have been awful...
...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...