RUN SOFTLY, GO FAST

by Barbara Wersba ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 1970

I took you to the theater -- Genet -- and you left at the intermission."" Once more into the generation gap where David rails at his just-dead father for two hundred pages: David Marks, nineteen-year-old preppie-turned-artist (""I didn't starve. I had my own show last year"") living with Sarah Lawrence dropout Maggie in an East Village loft vs. Leo Marks, ""the saga of the immigrant in MGM technicolor,"" Seventh Avenue gelt and Riverside Drive/Miami Beach gilt. In David's monologue, ranging back and forth over his early memories of his father as hero and comforter, disillusion, the battles up to the break, there are two fixed ideas: that Leo, in unwittingly revealing his liaison with a designer, made David impotent until Maggie ""brought me home""; and that, in accusing soulmate Rick of homosexuality, he triggered Rick's refusal to fight for C.O. status, his induction and death in Vietnam. Whether or not there is any basis for David's kneejerk rejection of Leo, the book is written as if we were supposed to think there was; until suddenly, five pages before the close, he recalls a forgotten remark, realizes that he has told only half the story, and lays his father to rest. David and Leo are equally intolerant, unattractive and stereotyped, so that the ending, is justice of a sort, but for the same reason none of it merits sympathetic attention. (There is also, for those who care, a descent into the bowels of hippiedom where a four-year-old is kept happy on speed and during which 'one perfect acid trip' ""had done something beautiful to my work"" and ""pot had become natural to me."")

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION