Adams, Alice (Vol. 6) | Adams, Alice 1926–
Adams, Alice 1926–
Alice Adams is an American short story writer and novelist.
Families and Survivors is a sneaky novel. As you start to read you are taken in: the writing seems so sharp, so clean, so controlled. Moreover, the author, a frequent New Yorker contributor, knows how to handle the material of fiction—narrative, dialogue, description, and so on. Her accomplished prose carries her a long way, even to the manipulation of the cliché, a sure sign of The Writer.
But as you read on, a number of serious flaws become ominously apparent and you begin to suspect that this material Adams handles with such ease is really very tired stuff, on the one hand, and on the other, stylistically indefensible.
The plot, a chronicle-shaped affair, spans thirty years—1941–1971—in the lives of Louisa, Kate, their friends, husbands, lovers, and ex's. The settings are brief and somehow unanchored; they hit Virginia, Radcliffe/Harvard,...
[The entire page is 1009 words long]
Navigate
