Word: storyists
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Among the reasons that the shuddery miniatures of British short-storyist John Collier are so satisfactory is that his fine talent is given direction by an equally splendid gift of malice. He does not much like man and his works, and is even less fond of woman and hers. He also has a deep and evident distaste for the dreary stuff that silts up lives and is called Reality. Collier's fictional method is to spit neatly into Reality's eye, and then watch mockingly as Reality fishes for its soiled handkerchief. To the reader, the spectacle...
Brian Moore, the talented Irish-Canadian author of The Feast of Lupercal and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, is the latest novelist to turn savagely on his own kind. Moore's miscreant hero is Brendan Tierney, a young Belfast short-storyist who has emigrated to New York and lost his faith, acquiring in its place a magazine job, some fake Danish furniture and an authentic American wife. Brendan's problem is that he is almost 30, the age at which a promising writer either writes something or becomes merely a pawned talent...
...between millstones. Naturally, given the Catholic fondness for sanguinary names, the order's publishing house is called the Millstone Press. The dear, droll priest has cluttered up magazines (Father Juniper) and movie houses (Bing and Barry) for years. The work of J. F. Powers, a New Yorker short-storyist writing his first novel, is of a higher order. During this superior burlesque, Powers deftly shades his portrait of Father Urban so that at the novel's end, when the priest grows old and ill, the reader feels not the absence of a comic figure but the loss...
...Philip Roth who faces the ordeal. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, published three years ago when he was 27, won him a National Book Award and justified acclaim as the best American short storyist to appear since Salinger. It was a sour, funny look at Jewish life in the U.S., and the only doubt critics had was whether an author capable of such superb genre-painting would ever trouble himself to attempt the bigger (and presumably more important) picture...
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