Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Potok, Chaim (Vol. 112) - Granville Hicks (review date 29 April 1967)

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Granville Hicks (review date 29 April 1967)

SOURCE: "Good Fathers and Good Sons," in Saturday Review, April 29, 1967, pp. 25-6.

[In the following review, Hicks offers praise for The Chosen, which he describes as "a fine, moving, gratifying book."]

The impression one gets from most contemporary fiction is that youth today is both disturbed and disturbing. Everyone knows about J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who, with the best of intentions, gets into one mess after another. But Holden's troubles are nothing compared to the difficulties of other young people we read about. Wright Morris's Jubal Gainer whirls away on his (stolen) motorcycle from crime to crime. John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom runs and runs. The college students in John Nichols's The Sterile Cuckoo major in alcohol and sex, but they are tame in comparison with the undergraduates in the late Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. John...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Granville Hicks (review date 29 April 1967)
   2. Edmund Fuller (review date 15 May 1967)
   3. Sandra Schmidt (review date 20 July 1967)
   4. Times Literary Supplement (review date 31 August 1967)
   5. Richard Freedman (review date 14 September 1969)
   6. Dorothy Rabinowitz (review date May 1970)
   7. Washington Post Book World (review date 3 December 1978)
   8. J. D. Reed (review date 19 October 1981)
   9. John H. Timmerman (essay date 16 May 1984)
   10. Time (review date 25 March 1985)
   11. Paul Cowan (review date 31 March 1985)
   12. Cynthia Grenier (review date 29 April 1985)
   13. Susan Reed (review date 6 May 1985)
   14. Edward A. Abramson (essay date 1986)
   15. S. Lillian Kremer (essay date 1989)
   16. Andy Solomon (review date 6 May 1990)
   17. Nikki Stiller (review date 13 May 1990)
   18. Brian Morton (review date 2 November 1990)
   19. Irving Abrahamson (review date 17 May 1992)
   20. Bryan Cheyette (review date 27 November 1992)
   21. Felicity Barringer (review date 1 December 1996)
   22. David M. Shribman (review date 12 December 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright