Word: segale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Oliver's Story, Segal (11ast week...
FICTION 1 -Oliver' s Story, Segal (3 last week...
...ONLY assume that Erich Segal's goal in life is to be dipped in bronze and mounted somewhere on the Harvard campus. I, for one, would be happy to gratify that wish. Apparently unsatisfied with Love Story, the classic mawkish, lightweight novel, Segal has unloaded a sequel. But for all his insipid sentimentality about Harvard and his nauseatingly self-conscious style, Segal is no fool. Oliver's Story is selling like hotcakes, and Rona Barrett is probably spreading rumors about how much Ryan O'Neal wants for the inevitable film version...
Oliver's Story (note the original title) takes its rightful place on a literary scale with its inconsequential predecessor, but it weighs in at a whopping 264 pages, more than twice as long as Love Story. The problem is that Segal cannot make the same trick work twice. His style is exactly the same as in Love Story, but the sequel has neither the wit nor the brevity that made Love Story the dubious achievement that it was. Oliver's life as a widower simply is not interesting enough to fill that many pages. Perhaps the only encouraging thing about...
...Segal's gall in using the same homogenized success formula is annoying. Love Story was somewhat ingenuous the first time, but this time around Segal's clearly going for the gold. In this version the style is too cute and unoriginal to succeed. But there's an even more irksome side to the Segal works for Harvard readers. Segal's portrayal of Harvard is distorted, yet it is the one that millions of Americans apparently want to believe. The syndrome is a familiar one: Segal obviously fell head over heels in love with Harvard and all its money-encrusted trappings...