Word: storeys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thomas Merton, the compleat bohemian who became a Trappist monk at 26, has carried on an astringent "dialogue with the world" ever since. In his 24 years as a member of Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani, he has built a seven-storey mountain of poems, autobiography, reflection and translation that attests to his continuing concern for mankind at large. In this collection of essays and letters, Merton punctures the white liberal's complacent participation in the civil rights movement as a kind of self-indulgence that is of "no interest to the Negro." In his view, what...
...neurosis that does not know when to shut up, and the reader may be forgiven for receiving glumly the news that still another fictional treatment of homosexualism has been published. And, in the case of Radcliffe, despite a fitful display of considerable writing skill by young British Novelist David Storey, the gloom is justified...
Radcliffe is a "big" novel of the kind which, in English literature, at least, has been turned out almost exclusively by U.S. writers since World War II. Weighty issues are mentioned weightily, and the kettledrums are almost never silent. Before Storey is through, he has confronted the reader with the alienation of the individual, the decline of the aristocratic tradition, the nastiness of the mass, the calamitous Christian duality of soul and body, and almost everything else that could be considered a factor in the decline of the West. Given a Norman Mailer of their own after years of Kingsley...
...troubled aristocrat who has taken a job as caretaker of his decaying family's decaying mansion. From his childhood it has been clear that Leonard is brilliant and in some way blighted. For several chapters, the best of the book, it seems that Storey intends to revive that abandoned form, the psychological novel. His dry, astringent description of Leonard's decline into adulthood is drawn from that curious middle ground between detachment and involvement that Dostoevsky used...
...signs. Superfluous minor characters become infected with the author's garrulity, deliver portentous sermons, and then drift off to irresolution. The dry prose becomes dewy. There are long, dare-taking sex scenes of the kind that, in he-she form, would seem overwritten in a Frank Yerby novel. Storey's tactic is not to ask the reader to tolerate homosexualism intellectually, but to acquiesce emotionally, thus merely increasing the reader's impatience...