Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pieces reads suspiciously like his past story collections-fragmented, humming with vaguely malevolent absurdities. This book's innocent pleasures stem from seeing how far the author can jump. The Consumer Bulletin Annual, for instance, hardly seems a bouncy platform for whimsy. Yet Barthelme somersaults from it into the tale of a hapless soul whose purchases consistently turn out to be substandard. "Consider the case of the bedside clock. 'Check for loudness of tick,' the Annual said. I checked. It ticked. Tick seemed decorous. Once installed in home, it boomed like...
Such equivocations blind them to the truth of their situation, which is also the novel's truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does...
Competing Manias. This elemental tale is played out against a backdrop of the here and now. Heroin brings the Viet Nam War home to a sunny California filled with burnt-out cases from the '60s: deracinated hippies, faded gurus, old people driven mad by the gap between promise and truth. This Western strip of civilization has become a collection of competing manias, and its traces-rooming houses, motels, highways-are perched on the edge of primitive wilderness. Driving out of Los Angeles, Hicks comments on the quick change of scenery: "Go out for a Sunday spin...
Whether Holmes ever lived outside Watson's cranium is doubtful, especially as this bizarre tale of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution overtaxes the reader's suspension of disbelief. Apparently Watson lay in the fell grasp of senility when he delivered this blithering monologue to a secretary in an old-age home, and Nicholas Meyer distilled...
WHOEVER OUR AUTHOR is--the aging Watson or the youthful Meyer--he has created this tale out of the stuff of the traditional Holmes canon in a brilliant and startling fashion. The Reichenbach Falls death-struggle of the Final Problem has been elevated here to a hellish showdown above a train careening through the Bavarian mountainscape. The Moriarty mystique has been defused until it becomes simply Holmes's refracted trauma at having discovered two skeletons in his father's closet. And the story, with its pivotal heroine, its deferentially anonymous references to European nobility, its global crisis in the offing...