Word: saroyans
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Since 1934, Saroyan has turned out generous quantities of short stories, novels, and at least one distinguished play (The Time of Your Life). At his best, when dealing with small boys, Armenian Americans, and poets without portfolio, he has won himself a modest but lasting place in our literature; at his worst, whenever he gets involved in Issues or Ideas (both with capital I's), he falls flatter than Bahgh-arch, the Armenian flat bread. There is a third capitalized I that has proved fatal to Saroyan: the plain, unsimple I of his boundless...
...this and his considerable tax debt that are responsible for Saroyan's new book, Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, which the publishers hopefully label "an autobiography," but which belongs to a genre somewhere in between Bulfinch and Paul Bunyan (the latter, judging by the final -yan, perhaps also of Armenian extraction...
Arrival of Myself. The book consists of 52 vignettes, a number that may have dual significance: it was the author's age at the time of writing and the pieces could be taken as Dr. Saroyan's Sunday sermons for the new year. The writing, at any rate, is that of a Sunday writer, but one who can do a fairly good take-off on William Saroyan, improving on his original by means of a slight admixture of avant-garde spice...
...vignettes ramble through Saroyan's life in no particular order, but they tend to bunch up at both ends, thus dealing mostly with his childhood and puberty and the present, i.e., his early 50s. Running through them all are those two great mythic figures, The Tax Collector and William Saroyan The Universal Genius. "My plays are the human race. And most of the plays of the other playwrights aren't." "My own [writing] which nobody's writing will outlive . . . will be discovered again and again. It will speak ... as long as any writing speaks to anybody...
...Great Lover. Here and there, a bit of the old good Saroyan peeps through. In a lengthy meditation on the personality of numbers: "3,000 hasn't got that little extra something that is the difference between a great piano player like Richter, for instance, and a poor piano player like my cousin Hoosik, who is actually a lawyer." Or: "You are never under any circumstance to speak discourteously to your mother, as that is not only unAmerican, it is un-Chinese." But the old, pure, wonderfully hammy love for all humanity is lacking. And there...