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In the following negative review, Cooper identifies cliched characters and bad writing as two reasons why Body and Soul is a "disappointment."
Younger writers who've pulled off that rare feat, a wonderful first book, work on under a hefty burden of expectations. Frank Conroy was thirty in 1967 when he published Stop-Time, his memoirs of a childhood marked by the absence of a disturbed and alcoholic father. A collection of sharp images retrieved "from the very edge of memory," Stop-Time anatomized experience rather than judged it, setting forth episodes of boyhood - the thrill of scavenging an abandoned building with a best friend, the brutal beating of a helpless fat boy at boarding school - from a detached, almost amoral perspective that held out to readers the persistent illusion of breaking through adult sentimentality to see life as it "really" was.
Praised lavishly for its intelligent candor by...
This section contains 1,587 words (approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page) |
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