THE FAR SIDE

Once upon a time, say 20 years ago, Wirt Williams was compared to Hemingway and the great man wrote a few nice words about one of his early books. He ended up, sad to say, more like James Jones who spent some time at a not-so-Famous Writers School run by a Mrs. Lowney Handy in a small trailer camp. This seems quite obviously to be the site in Mr. Williams' even more obvious book, just as surely as Mrs. Lowney Handy becomes Mrs. Karen Munday, a very ballsy woman -- lots of ""priceless juice. . . no taste."" Slade, the would-be-writer of this book, manages a commercial success under her tutelage but after a year away from her is forced back. She does get another (not so successful) book out of him and they fasten on each other in a furiously sensuous relationship before he gets shet of her altogether. And you get shet of Slade. He's not a great loss -- like Jones, his stay at The Colony (as it was called in Bowers' actual account of it -- 1971) only sent him on his way downhill.