Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. It appeared as a Gold Medal Paperback in 1961.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. An early work of Vonnegut's, he has since improved. This is a gothic melange of stygian ideologies in a world whose only spiritual search is for pure evil. The crime? Merely being part of the world as it was and is. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reason." Howard finally finds himself guilty. Howard writes about his life in Germany before his involvement, of his marriage to the daughter of a Police Chief, of the romantic plays he wrote as an apolitical young idealist who thought of the Nazis: "They were people," of Adolph Eichmann whom he meets in Jail, of a broad spectrum of contemporary American racist groups. Writanen doesn't come forward and the only other person who knew what Howard was up to was the man he had referred to in his broadcasts as Franklin Delano Rosenfeld. Nobody believes the story of how he- an American born, German reared playwright- was recruited by an agent called Frank Writanen to get messages out of Berlin. In fact, Howard was an agent for the United States, ciphering his racist broadcasts with important messages for The Free World. writes his memoirs while awaiting trial in Israel for the war crimes he committed during the Second World War as a big time Nazi propagandist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |