Word: readers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...groupies who thrive on Vonnegut's simplistic reductions of life's problems into phrases like "So it goes," and those who go for his one-of-a-kind style and sarcastic commentary on life in the U.S.--will come away from Jailbird more than satisfied. And if the reader hails from within Harvard's ivy-covered walls, the sense of fulfillment will no doubt prove even more complete--Jailbird is not just another of the current rash of "life after Harvard" novels. Instead, it clearly portrays the vast dichotomy between the way the world views Harvard graduates...
...pages of poetry, too-as difficult and rewarding. Gordimer's structure demands ingenuity and patience. It's choppy--long descriptions interspersed with telegraphic bits of interior monologue and haphazard conversation. She switches perspectives to let Rosa explain how she sees herself and how she believes others see her. The reader has to fit it all together, compose a life out of these poetic fragments...
...novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely death...
Perhaps; but such an author wastes little of that love on his reader...
...affair of Lady Amherst and Mensch holds the reader's chief interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide...