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SOURCE: Kaplan, Howard. “In Brief.” Commonweal 107, no. 10 (23 May 1980): 319.
In the following review, Kaplan criticizes Dybek for his use of child narrators, a device which Kaplan states allows Dybek an easy escape from deeper analysis.
You can tell the romantic writer by his choice of characters: he's a sucker for outsiders and underground men. In these eleven Chicago stories Stuart Dybek writes about pushcart peddlers (“The Palatski Man”), an amateur ornithologist holed up in a condemned building (“Blood Soup”), sots, pederasts, paranoid DPs. A tough bunch to get to know well in real life, even for writers. So when Dybek filters their stories through a child's point of view, as he tends to do, the strategy smacks of convenience more than anything else: a child doesn't have to pretend to understand what he sees. Over and over we wind up with the little tyke's sense of wonder and no...
This section contains 294 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) |
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