Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Trevor, William (Vol. 25) - Jack Beatty

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JACK BEATTY

The three aesthetic challenges of [Other People's Worlds] are to establish Julia's innocence on credible grounds, to show it first as weakness and then as strength, and to intimate, lightly, the sources of Francis's malignity. Trevor succeeds with Julia, but I think he goes too far in the direction of the explicit with Francis. Still, it is a real artistic dilemma; if he tells too little about Francis, then allegory will rear its blunt head; too much, and the mystery around Francis will dissipate, revealing a case history. In these matters, a little early Freud can be dangerous; and Trevor, I think, errs in furnishing us with the childhood seduction theory as the key to Francis's foul nature. This error grows out of an attempt to avoid the greater simplifications of allegory. But since the essence of Francis's evil is his sheer externality, furnishing him with this gross scar shifts our attention from surface to psyche. It would have been better...

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1. Introduction
2. John Lucas
3. Terence Winch
4. Jack Beatty
5. John Updike
6. Michael Garvey
7. Peter Kemp
8. Anatole Broyard
9. Jon Pareles
10. Ted Solotaroff
11. Patrick Skene Catling
12. Copyright