The Eye of the Story is a challenging title. Miss Welty is concerned throughout this book with fiction, with fictions, and with how the process of writing turns truth into a novel or story. Analysis travels backwards, she says, but the writer works into the open. She makes the engaging assumption that her readers are as interested and knowledgeable about these problems as she is herself, and that they too will be glad when a story works, when an author succeeds. "Jane Austen loved high spirits, she had them herself, and she always rejoiced in the young." Of Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man: "what gives me special satisfaction about it is that no one but a good writer — this good writer — could possibly have brought it off." Other enthusiasms are Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, and, from many years back, S.J. Perelman. Miss Welty can be tart, as when she judges Arthur Mizener's book on Ford Maddox Ford inadequate—because Ford deserved a better book. The last, purely personel section includes her introduction to a cookbook of Jackson recipes and the preface to a collection of her own Mississippi photographs, One Time, One Place, as well as several vignettes of local scenes. In "Some Notes on River Country," we see "the little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez" where "the houses merge into a shaggy fringe at the foot of the bluff." In the childhood memoir "The Little Store" she tells us: "I believed the Little Store to be a center of the outside world, and hence of happiness—as I believed what I found in the Crackerjack box to be a genuine prize, which was as simply as I believed in the Golden Fleece." These pieces clarify Eudora Welty's presence: in life, as in her writings, she is self-possessed but never self-absorbed.
Pub Date: April 28, 1978
ISBN: 0679730044
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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