Word: saroyans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wallach's new one is especially funny because of its novel gimmick. Hackney, says Wallach, is one of the great unsung literati of our era, great because he managed to do everything years before it was done by the person we credit with doing it. Hackney, for instance, out Saroyaned Saroyan and out-Bellowed Saul Bellow, and did it first. "Gutenberg's Folly" is therefore a labor of love: dying from a surfeit of chopped liver canapes, Hackney willed Wallach his wife and his work...
...stars this time were also more propitious. Madam is a light philosophic fantasy, about equidistant between Saroyan and Thornton Wilder, yet with a flavor and philosophy of its own. It tells how, from a sense of guilt, Mary Doyle, the heiress daughter of "a Tammany grafter who died in Sing Sing," has turned recluse. Into her parlor steps persuasive Dr. Brightlee, whom the audience has no trouble identifying as the Devil. But this devil is for the most part on the side of the angels-on the side, at any rate, of the world's artists and individualists...
This is the side of Saroyan that brings on his failure. Philosophically, he has reached a dead end. The Laughing Matter ends with a suicide, a shooting, and a fatal automobile accident. The book builds up to a point of tension, but Saroyan's obsession with this "bad world" makes the plot resolution completely unsatisfying...
...there is another side of Saroyan, and this is the side in which his brilliance shines. He written through people who are warm and compassionate, simple and tender, people who are grouping for something to understand. His style here is free and uncomplicated, and in The Laughing Matter he duplicates the fine prose that made The Human Comery and the Aram stories outstanding...
...large portion of the book Saroyan's prose stands out against the anguish of the situation, making the pain of his characters terrible in its poignancy. It is unfortunate that it must all sink in the bog of his plot...