Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hannah, Barry (Vol. 23) - John Updike

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JOHN UPDIKE

["Geronimo Rex"] belongs to an older tradition—the whining-adolescent novel of the fifties. The action begins in 1950, when the hero, Harry Monroe, is eight years old, and ends in the middle sixties, when he is married and a graduate student of English at the University of Arkansas. America broke in two in those years, when Johnson committed the half-million troops to Vietnam, and the new consciousness … figures in "Geronimo Rex" as a bleak dawn, an irony heavily in hock to despair, an accelerating incoherence in the never very tightly woven events that make up the novel's action…. The major weakness of a first novel like this is its limp susceptibility to autobiographical accident; its vitality must lie not in the shaping but in the language of the telling, and here Mr. Hannah is no mean performer. His whine is full-throated…. (p. 121)

With the verve of the young Bellow but with little of Bellow's love, Mr. Hannah can seize a person and...

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1. Introduction
2. Jim Harrison
3. John Updike
4. Jonathan Yardley
5. John Skow
6. Michael Wood
7. Richard Locke
8. Michael Malone
9. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
10. Harry Crews
11. BENJAMIN DeMOTT
12. Eliot Fremont-Smith
13. Ronald Nevans
14. Geoffrey Wolff
15. John Romano
16. Copyright

1. John Updike