Whistling in the Dark: True Stories and Other Fables - Hardcover

Garrett, George

9780151913138: Whistling in the Dark: True Stories and Other Fables

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151913137 ISBN 13: 9780151913138

Publisher: Harcourt, 1992

The author looks back on his days in military school, at Princeton, and in the army, and offers commentaries on literature, the state of politics, and his forebears who fought in the Civil War

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From Kirkus Reviews:

The author of more than two dozen works of fiction (Entered From the Sun, 1990, etc.), biography (James Jones, 1984), criticism, poetry, and drama now turns his considerable powers to studied introspection. Garrett (English/Univ. of Virginia) nearly, but not quite, comes up with an autobiography--an art form he describes as, at its best, ``a cry for mercy concealed as a nonnegotiable demand for justice.'' That rings particularly true when the story has, as his does, a southern exposure, with its very diction and sensibility embedded in the War (the one between the states, of course). To be sure, there are narratives of other wars--in Europe, for example, or in the boxing ring. On occasion, the text, like a Broadway musical, bursts out of its mannered prose into creditable poetry and then lapses back into Garrett's wandering style-- ``digression,'' he confesses, ``being the essence of my style.'' Another badge of his method is his penchant for eschewing the ancient and elementary rule of usage that requires a noun and a verb to appear together in the same sentence. Garrett does have his prejudices when it comes to his craft. There are kind words for fellow denizens of Dixie (Shelby Foote and James Dickey) and bit of buckshot for the likes of John Irving, John Updike, and Robert Coover. One story seems to be in homage to Hemingway. As for himself, Garrett, ever on the high road, discovers ``a strong and deep feeling that virtuous acts that lead to any kind of profit or reward or...any forms of conventional honor and respect are not so much beneath contempt as unworthy of serious attention.'' A cranky test, celebratory of the writer's art, to which some attention may be paid. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Much is enjoyable and uplifting in this farrago of memoir, fable, poem and essay, most of which previously appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review . Garrett, author of novels, poetry, short fiction, biography and criticism, strides down the paths his narratives take him with careful, assertive writing. In the reflective pieces, he often allows himself the heroic poise of inspirational rhetoric. As he tells of wartime experience and legacy, the noble character of his tribe (be it defined as blood relatives or Anglo-American white men), the two one-eyed (literally) coaches from his days at the Sewanee Military Academy and Princeton, or anecdotes from other halcyon days of academe, the prose has a lithe, muscular glow. Some readers will find this glow self-serving, even pompous. Garrett's style often rides clipped, declarative rhythms that are almost Hemingwayesque, and aspects of his material--war, Europe, pugilism--demand comparison to Papa. The book's second section, "Doing the Literary," indulges in backhand criticisms of certain literary figures' callowness or cowardliness, and authorial confidence begins to smell like mean arrogance. Yet for all its too readily stereotyped material and minor irritations, Garrett's voice is powerful and articulate.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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