Adams, Alice (Vol. 13) | Susan Wood
SUSAN WOOD
No other writer in recent memory has called to mind quite so clearly the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, both in style and subject matter, as Alice Adams does in [the short stories in Beautiful Girl]. But to say that her work resembles Fitzgerald's—a resemblance that was apparent in her novels, Careless Love, Families and Survivors and Listening to Billie—is not to suggest that Adams is some sort of second-rate imitator. Like all writers of any significance, she knows her past, her inheritance, and has learned how to use it in her own time and place; it is a matter of carrying on and extending a particular tradition….
Like Fitzgerald, [Alice Adams] has a fine satiric eye softened by a tenderness toward human desire and frailty. The first three stories in the book introduce us to the Todds, carrying us through a period of 35 years in their lives. "Verlie I Say Unto You," surely one of the finest of these fine stories, shows...
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