SOURCE: Klawans, Stuart. Review of Lone Star, by John Sayles. Nation 263, no. 4 (29 July-5 August 1996): 34-6.

In the following review, Klawans criticizes the storytelling technique in Lone Star, suggesting that Sayles is more interested in defying narrative conventions than in telling a good story.

My editors disagree completely with the following remarks. Nevertheless: I think John Sayles gave away his game a couple of years ago in Passion Fish, his movie about a soap-opera star who is paralyzed in an accident—the sort of event she's been confronting five days a week on TV, and which she now faces in “real life.” The suppression of quotation marks, I think, is the game. “You know the boundaries of fiction,” Sayles seemed to say. “Now see how I break them down, to let in life itself.”

In other films, too, Sayles has announced his triumph over narrative conventions: the self-dramatizing lore...