Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Greenberg, Joanne (Goldenberg) - Haskel Frankel

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HASKEL FRANKEL

It is difficult to appraise I Never Promised You a Rose Garden as a work of fiction, which is what Hannah Green … chooses to call it. As a novel it is flawed; as nonfiction it is a painfully memorable case history told with great honesty….

Mrs. Green never attempts to shock the reader or to sensationalize for large sales. When Deborah is driven to inflict burns upon herself with stolen cigarettes, the author relates the incident from so deep a vantage point within the patient's mind that one sees the logical illogicality which is the ever-present truth in the behavior of the disturbed.

In Dr. Fried she has conveyed a true portrait of the analyst at work—serving as a warm wall against which Deborah can throw herself mentally, always to bounce back against herself with gradually decreasing intensity. Mrs. Green's picture of the patients, their lives among themselves and in relation to the hospital staff, is also revealingly...

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1. Introduction
2. George E. Gravel
3. Time
4. The Times Literary Supplement
5. R. V. Cassill
6. Haskel Frankel
7. The Times Literary Supplement
8. Brigid Brophy
9. Joyce Carol Oates
10. Roger Sale
11. Victor Howes
12. KARY K. WOLFE and GARY K. WOLFE
13. James R. Frakes
14. Paul Gray
15. Hilma Wolitzer
16. GERRY McBROOM
17. Sanford Pinsker
18. Ruth R. Wisse
19. Norma B. Williamson
20. Meg Elliott Garber
21. Robert C. Small
22. Susan Dooley
23. Gregory Maguire
24. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates