Word: writes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least. Don't be like that." Later he fakes a suicide while his son watches. In the light of these episodes, Geoffrey Wolff's greatest achievement is not that he managed to write such a balanced account of his upbringing, but that he managed to come through this upbringing with his sanity intact...
Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...
...might notice that these characters don't write to each other at all. At different times their stories overlap, and by the end of Letters they're all related by marriage or adultery. But Barth's assumption of the epistolary novelist's cloak is a fiction: Letters shares nothing with models like Richardson's Clarissa...
...there is one problem with this book, however, it is the chapter on China--problem, because Shaplen has decided not to write one. In his conclusion, where he assesses China's impact on the surrounding nations in a scant ten pages. Shaplen offers us a weak-kneed rationalization. To discuss the mainland, he insists, would require an entire book. But elsewhere, he eagerly tackles Japan in less than 100 pages and the Philipines in even fewer. While one might expect this--American reporters' access to the mainland has been extremely limited--it leaves a gaping hole. A Turning Wheel...
...where Shaplen has chosen to write, he has done a spectacular job. For the expert on the Vietnam war or the student who has never heard of Kuala Lumpur. A Turning Wheel is required reading. Shaplen's ability to preach without being pretentious and to find the personal thread among the sweep of revolution is extraordinary. If his vision of Asia's future is hesitant, then he has learned more than most writers and journalists