Word: sheed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives him an advanced course in the three Bs: boredom, bullying and befuddlement...
...BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC by Wilfrid Sheed. 246 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
When Charles Dickens was twelve, his debt-hounded family yanked him from school and sent him to work in a ratty London warehouse where blacking paste was made. His ordeal lasted only a few months, then he returned to school. But, as Wilfrid Sheed notes in a preface to this brace of new fiction pieces, a sense of shock and abandonment stayed with Dickens the rest of his life. He could not even bring himself to mention the episode until 25 years later, when he wrote bitterly of "the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless...
...Sheed has already disclosed in a prologue what all this leads to. In later life, James Bannister becomes owner and resident propagandist of two right-wing radio stations in California. Aloof and "Eastern" in the West, he fervently eulogizes his conception of a departed America while railing against English decadence in an incurable English accent. But Sheed's tale is more than an ironic pathology of the right-wing mind, more, even, than a wry diagnosis of a severely fractured nationality. It also captures the comic anguish of a youth who begins to understand himself just at the moment...
...hears Gabriel Heatter, the doom-laden commentator, warn "of dreaded pyorrhea." On another occasion, Charley, in adolescent bravado, adds "the suicide caper to his repertoire of small talk, using it to fascinate women." Alas, it only bores them. As a companion piece to Factory, the story sharply emphasizes Sheed's overall theme: the harmful consequences of clutching at visions of the past, whether they are mythical but life-sustaining visions like Jimmy's or real but death-dealing ones like Charley...