Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Banks, Russell - Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)

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Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)

SOURCE: Herron, Jerry. “American Anger and the Lost Art of Liking.” Georgia Review 50, no. 3 (fall 1996): 609-15.

[In the following excerpt, Herron compares the portrayals of American society in Rule of the Bone and Witold Rybczynski's City Life, commenting that both novels function as “mirrors” of contemporary social mores.]

By this late date in the “American Century,” it is probably unnecessary to point out how angry we are at each other, civically speaking, with Americans robbing, raping, murdering, incarcerating, and executing one another at rates that make us the wonder, if not precisely the envy, of the so-called developed world. And for those not prone to physical expressions of feeling, there are the simulacral beguilements of going down by law, which prove irresistible to an ever increasing number of actionable citizens. A toll-free number (1-800-LAW-SUIT) now offers...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)
   2. Jeff Danziger (review date 24 September 1991)
   3. Donna Rifkind (review date 17 April 1992)
   4. James Finn Cotter (review date 2 May 1992)
   5. Ross Leckie (essay date summer 1994)
   6. Richard Eder (review date 21 May 1995)
   7. Ann Hulbert (review date 29 May 1995)
   8. Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)
   9. Phil Baker (review date 30 June 1995)
   10. Brian Morton (review date 7 July 1995)
   11. Ed Peaco (review date fall 1995)
   12. Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)
   13. Robert Niemi (essay date 1997)
   14. Henry Mayer (review date 8 March 1998)
   15. Russell Banks and Christine Benvenuto (interview date March-April 1998)
   16. Alfred Kazin (review date 9 April 1998)
   17. Lawrence Hill (review date 13 April 1998)
   18. James M. McPherson (review date May 1998)
   19. Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
   20. Russell Banks, Robert Faggen, and Barry Munger (interview date summer 1998)
   21. Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)
   22. Paul Binding (review date 15 September 2000)
   23. Kathleen Snodgrass (review date spring 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright