Word: sunlights
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...mafioso would-be's and syphilitic has-beens--can take a bus going to Batavia Downs to "maybe someday hit it big." Batavia isn't known for much else--it certainly isn't a very likely setting for a novel with the high aspirations of John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues. But poor Batavia is not as much to blame as John Gardner...
Like Klee's plant forms, Waldenburg's stay close to geometrical shape--and thus close to the ambiguous line between living and non-living--and are set in regular rows. The light which makes them grow is too diffuse and dull to be sunlight; the forms seem to be machined flat in a manner that is occasionally reminiscent of Purism and its lathed still-lives...
...just how they are related is distractingly unclear. In several cases where the direction of the sequence is intentionally left uncertain the effect is confusion rather than ambiguity. His finest product ties together several frames of a woman and child getting up in the morning with bars of morning sunlight but in general one has to be skeptical of Wise's posted statement that he united the sequences through "formal relations and through the structure of narrative, myth, and ritual...
...crash occurred at 4 p.m., just as sunlight on the mountains was fading. That night the survivors huddled together in the wrecked fuselage. When dawn came next morning, they ripped off seat covers and put on rugby uniforms over their light summer-weight clothes for extra warmth. Pieces of tinted glass from plane windows became sunglasses against the snow glare. On a transistor radio hooked up to the plane's only working battery, they heard that a search had begun. When a plane appeared overhead, they flashed pieces of aluminum from the wreckage to signal it. The effort...
...SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES by John Gardner. In the finest novel of the year wisdom and magic turn a small American town into the metaphysical crossroads of the modern world...