Word: stones
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...story begins, Clem emerges from his cocoon of dirty laundry onto the Via Veneto for a day or so of wife-sitting with Hilda, pregnant bride of his old school and college pal Mark Stone (né Stein). Stone is now a widely liberal rabbi, and busy with last-minute preparations for his International Conference on Love to be held at the offices of the U.S. Information Service. Hilda and her attendant Clem attend the conference, go to bed, get mixed up in a May Day demonstration in the Piazza del Popolo. Clem knocks Mark cold (with a stone, naturally...
...does Stone stone Stone? The unwary reader may think it is out of sheer petulance. But the real clue to this odd story is to be found not in the novel itself, but in Dr. Fiedler's critical writings-notably Love and Death in the American Novel. Read thus, The Second Stone offers some of the rarest pleasure of the year, combining the attractions of Scrabble, the double-crostic, literary name-spotting and one-upmanship with the humbler delights of the whodunit. This is a parable and the characters are crazy mythed-up people...
Mark is the rolling stone who has learned the trick of gathering moss. As a rebel of the '30s, Mark's mainstream Marxism made his campus career; but Clem ("an Infantile Leftist") was the type who went to jail. Now Mark has burgeoned in his bogus beard as a TV-forum type, a voice of religiosity cum psychoanalytical fashion. Clem sneers at him as "Temple B'nai Kierkegaard...
Actually Clem and Mark are plainly intended to be stand-ins for one man- Mark Twain. According to a favorite Fiedler theory, the true rebel was the private Sam Clemens as opposed to the public entertainer Mark Twain. Never these twain will meet-or part. The Second Stone is a skillfully contrived dramatization of this dichotomy. Clem is the defiant Huck Finn who has "lit out for the frontier" with his big "no" to "the world of mothers." Mark is Tom Sawyer, the pseudo rebel "with a note in his pocket to Aunt Polly" saying he loves...
...Lorenzo) to his credit. In it, Richardson plays hide-and-seek with the questions of freedom, reality and life's purpose. Despite the author's overfondness for obscure-and sometimes misspelled-words, such as lachrymator, ecdysize, catasta, edacious and vibrissae,* Filmore's wide-eyed discovery that stone walls do not a prison make has some fine moments of upside-down humor. When his rollicking stay behind bars is ended by an untimely parole, Filmore promptly holds up a Salvation Army Mission and steals the collection box in order to speed his return to dear old Audton...