Body and Soul | A Long-Awaited Encore
In the following negative review, Cooper identifies
clichéd characters and bad writing as two
reasons why Body and Soul is a “disappointment.”
Younger writers who’ve pulled off that rare feat, a wonderful first book, work on under a hefty burden of expectations. Frank Conroy was thirty in 1967 when he published Stop-Time, his memoirs of a childhood marked by the absence of a disturbed and alcoholic father. A collection of sharp images retrieved “from the very edge of memory,” Stop- Time anatomized experience rather than judged it, setting forth episodes of boyhood—the thrill of scavenging an abandoned building with a best friend, the brutal beating of a helpless fat boy at boarding school—from a detached,...
[The entire page is 1646 words long]
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