PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION

by Randall Jarrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

An unquiet academic report from a poet-critic, this parades the educational zoo of the very expensive, progressive Benton College as the short tenure of the novelist, Gertrude Johnson, stings and immobilizes President down to secretary. Gertrude, temporarily teaching creative writing, exposes herself, her husband and the staff with her arid, unrestrained condemnations; roils the infinite monotony and instigates an excessive chaos. The first person narration, by a member of the English department, indicates the caste that does not believe in caste, the striation of the lives of President and Mrs. Robbins, the Whittakers, the Rosenbaums, Constance Morgan, Gertrude and her omnipresent husband, Sidney Bacon, and the novel that is forming through the dissection of the collection before her. Her virtuoso performance carry their poison and the stripping of the shams, the pretensions, mirror, the pitiful self-deceptions and an enclosed, almost secret world. There are faculty with their social gestures, faculty with their intimate feelings, faculty with their classroom facade, as the double vision of Gertrude and her narrator pick away at their thin covering of self protection. A spiked broth in which headiness comes close to a headache but which does have the leaven of a discriminating and uncompromising humor.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1954

Categories: FICTION