Wonderfully disdainful of and respectful of Dicken's novels, if we can take Oates as a take on Dickens, and I think we can. Someone else, talking about , tells me she likes to imagine Yonge's novels if Yonge had had to make her way in California or Australia for a while. I don't know, though, maybe she would have retreated into a defensive shell of more-genteel-than-thou.
Maggs does, values gentility so far above its deserts that it nearly kills him. He reminded me of Agamemnon going to his bath, bull-like, so large and suspicious elsewhere and helpless against duplicity. It's a triple trick for his dialogue: it has to carry his considerable intelligence, without education, and then the huge gap in his street smarts and character-reading both when he's chasing his will-'o-the-wisp.
ISBN: 0-679-44008-9
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack