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THE FATHER And Other Stories by R.V. Cassill

THE FATHER And Other Stories

By

Pub Date: March 17th, 1965
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

This is a collection of ten short stories by the author of Clem Anderson, Pretty Leslie and The President. Three of them have academic backgrounds and the longest, And In My Heart, concerns an aging teacher's consuming involvement in the lives of a neurotic student and his wife. In Larchmoor is Not the World a teacher is ironically lured from his safe neutrality in the dubious defense of a young girl. And in The Goldfish a professor visits a former student who has married a Negro and his liberal patronizing becomes apparent. The Prize and The Biggest Band are first person recollections of incidents in a midwestern boyhood. The final, title story however is the most effective, in a gruesome way, of these generally skillful but undramatic pieces. It concerns the guilt of a father who thought it necessary to cut off his son's hand in order to save his life. He is led, in his deterioration, to a repetition of his guilt with his grandson. R. V. Cassill has a sharp sense of the psychologically disastrous and a keen eye for the accumulation of significant detail. But in this collection (and the same observation can be made about his novels) little real concern for his characters is evident and the reader thereby feels a corresponding lack of involvement.