Word: saroyans
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...HUMAN COMEDY - William Saroyan-Harcourt, Brace...
...people have wondered whether William Saroyan had it in him to write a whole, continuous novel. The Human Comedy, though it inevitably leaves its grandiloquent title looking like a half-inflated blimp, is a very nice novel indeed. It is, unfortunately, too nice to be as good, as it might have been if Saroyan were capable not only of goodness but of a concern with evil...
...Human Comedy is the story of a happy family in a small town in wartime. It is William Saroyan saying that life is not only worth living, fighting and dying for, but can be an almost unmitigated pleasure. As Mrs. Macauley tells her son Homer, if the world seems to a man "richly sad and full of beauty, it's the man himself so, and not the things around him. And so it is, if it's bad, or ugly, or pathetic -it is always the man himself, and each man is the world...
...democratic wisdom and kindness which, if it were true of teaching in general, would long ago have left nations incapable of war. On the job, to be sure, Homer has to carry messages of death in war to mothers in the town, and in these more complicated scenes Saroyan is deeply affecting. Homer finally gets such a message for his own mother. His dead brother's crippled, discharged comrade at arms brings the book to a precarious yet beautiful ending...
Little brother Ulysses, meanwhile, has made himself, in his four-year-old wanderings, the most delicately engaging character in the book. Saroyan seldom manages to embody emotions, but his lyric talent can brilliantly suggest even very subtle ones: Ulysses waving to a singing Negro on a passing freight; or handing his mother an egg as importantly as if it were the Eucharist; or, with a half-witted friend, scanning the books in the Public Library; or, before a robot in a shopwindow, first realizing death...