Synopsis
Gathers striking descriptive passages from various works of literature, and explains why they are successful
Reviews
In the second volume of an intended trilogy about writing, novelist/memoirist (and longtime Kirkus reviewer) Newlove (Curranne Trueheart, 1986, etc.) infuses readers with a sense of the power that real feeling, honestly observed, brings to great writing. Newlove sings and celebrates, and sometimes playfully deflates, gorgeous passages of description from Hemingway, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chandler, Mailer, Whitman, and many others. By describing how a particular passage strikes him--sometimes in the back muscles, sometimes straight through the heart--Newlove shows that it's earthy feeling rather than any superhuman feat of intellect or froth of words that carves out the indelible ``spiritual landscape'' of a Tolstoy or Shakespeare. Riffing on one classic passage after another, bubbling over with an infectious love of language, Newlove demonstrates how vision and moral force in literature flow always from some true perception of the value of life: Truth must come from ``a man's grip on life.'' Hence we taste the brine that Hemingway tastes in the oysters he gobbles in Paris; we share a luscious, greedy snack of ham with Thomas Wolfe; we embrace the world of the body with Whitman; we drink in horror at the hands of Conrad. We even sample the fall and rise of Newlove himself as ``Drunkspeare,'' an alcoholic writer step-by-step restored to his exuberant senses. In some of his most useful passages, Newlove jokes about greats like ``Wild Bill'' Shakespeare so that we may see ``the simplicity, almost raggedness of his lines.'' Newlove freely abridges Hemingway, and prunes Conrad's jungle, but, strangely, he touches not a word in Mailer's Ancient Evenings--seeing ``brilliancies everywhere--and not a stuffed bird among them.'' Here, as in First Paragraphs (1992), the self-styled ``Dr. Don'' gives transfusions of the living spirit ``that breathes out of the writer's breast.'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Newlove ( First Paragraphs , St. Martin's, 1992) has written an enthusiastic discussion of the art of descriptive writing. Using a variety of authors and genres, he focuses on the "moral force" of a writer's voice. He is unafraid to describe his likes and dislikes and does not hesitate to rewrite authors as he explains methods and styles. It is a pleasure to read his appreciations of Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. Unconcerned with theory and meta-criticism, Newlove is interested in the human aspect of the author's writing and how it affects the reader's emotions and imagination. He thinks that the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is one of the keys to effective writing. The other is the ability of an author to try to understand his or her own feelings and ideas. A fine book for beginning writers, it contains many eloquent examples of Newlove's attempts to understand his own life.
- Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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