Word: segal
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Love Story was a pretty low starting point. But at least it lacked the self-conscious nervousness that runs through this effort. In Fairy Tale, Segal does not even reach the heights attained by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. For some reason, every time he has the opportunity, he takes the cheap shot, makes some inane remark, or collapses into an idiot's snideness...
Fairy Tale is 47 pages of pictures and prose about hillbillies. Segal tells the story of a hick kid who goes into the big city to buy a used car from a dealer named Happy Humphrey, gets swindled, but through an ironic twist of fate wins out in the end. Happy Humphrey trades Jake Kertuffel a handful of lima beans (from which a money tree is supposed to grow) for the Model T in which the Kertuffel clan has sent its scion into the city. Ironically, a money tree springs up, and the Kertuffels buy a Cadillac with some...
ADMITTEDLY IT'S NOT much plot for five dollars, and Segal doesn't make up for that weakness in any other department. He's dispensed with things like descriptive prose, character development or even the maudlin emotion-grabbing of Love Story. Apparently amusement is the goal of this little book, and any strenuous exercise of intellect or emotions beyond that of, say, The Secret Storm or The Edge of Night is too tiring to be amusing...
...this is an uncomfortable book. It isn't a child's Fairy Tale--too much of the humor of the thing is of a mildly sick adult variety, the degenerate offshoot of upper-middle class Broadway comedy, with its pallid neuroses that all the ashamed afflicted can laugh at. Segal also makes a real effort at verbal acrobatics, and falls flat. "Magic beans, the stuff dreams are made of! And also magic vegetable stew," can't qualify as one of the better bits of verbal word play of the late 20th century...
...very irritating to spend an hour writing a review of a book that it takes 15 minutes to read and that Segal probably spent 45 minutes writing. This is the classical case of a book not worth reading, not worth writing, probably not worth writing about, and maybe not even worth reading about...