Goyen’s “intensely poetic style” may dissuade contemporary readers, but for those who return to his work, this biography...
The first biography of a tormented writer.
Joyce Carol Oates called William Goyen (1915-1983) “the most mysterious of writers…a seer; a troubled visionary; a spiritual presence in a national literature largely deprived of the spiritual.” Admired but hardly popular, Goyen never achieved the readership he coveted, as his difficult, emotionally effuse fiction read like “anguished confessions or emblem-rich sermons.” In this sympathetic study, Davis (English/Univ. of Denver; Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement, 2005, etc.) draws extensively on that fiction, in addition to letters, interviews, and a memoir by Goyen’s wife, actress Doris Roberts. Goyen grew up in East Texas and Houston, alienated and lonely. An emotionally fragile child, he was intimidated by his strict father, who quashed his desire to study music and dance. All of Goyen’s work, Davis writes, “can be understood as experimental spiritual autobiography,” centered on characters “set in opposition to the world”: “exiles, loners, kept apart less by a conscious rebelliousness than by an innate but often inexpressible difference.” Goyen felt different, in part, because he was bisexual. Intense affairs with men and the homophobic writer Katherine Anne Porter preceded his marriage to Roberts, at the age of 48. An artist, Goyen said, “is a disturbed, distressed, obsessed human being.” Fellow writer Anaïs Nin described him as “a man in pain…a wounded man.” His efforts to assuage his pain led to alcoholism; his search for spiritual comfort led to a religious conversion that resulted in his writing A Book of Jesus and taking on the role of “an eccentric evangelist,” treating dinner companions to readings from the New Testament.
Goyen’s “intensely poetic style” may dissuade contemporary readers, but for those who return to his work, this biography offers a thorough and illuminating grounding.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-292-76730-0
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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