![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() That other constellation, the window lights of Noreton fanning across the flank of Snowy Top, seems to retreat rather than to open toward us I am momentarily saddened, as if something has happened, but, of course, nothing has, and when I come in, Liz is sitting at her loom, a cup of tea steaming lazily at her side. ''I go out onto the porch and get some sticks of wood and look outward, and the sprays of stars washing through each other in the clear black sky above our valley fail to soothe me. ''I am agitated,'' Bob Miller thinks, at a point when the crisis seems to be beyond him. But the writing is always spare, and the emotional peaks tend to be moments like these: There are wonderful moments in these stories-the hunt for the Thanksgiving turkey in ''Good Will,'' for example. In each case, the ''effect'' of Smiley`s fiction comes from the lack of effect, the absence of gimmickry and strain. The threat those incidents pose to the hard-earned balance and serenity of the Millers` lives-the awareness the narrator has of the extent of the danger, coupled with his inability to arrest its flow-is very much of a piece with the crises in ''Ordinary Love'' and ''The Age of Grief.'' The girl whose dolls were destroyed is the only black child in this rural Pennsylvania school disturbingly, this incident is followed by another, as Tommy invites some classmates to look on while he rips the girl`s coat with scissors taken from the teacher`s desk. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |