Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Zindel, Paul (Vol. 26) - Isabel Quigly

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ISABEL QUIGLY

Paul Zindel's people seem to take over his book entirely and live so vividly you forget there's a narrator at all. [J. D.] Salinger managed the same effect in The Catcher in the Rye with an adolescent narrator who seemed to pickle a generation forever in his chat (which some found insufferably coy). Nobody thought his book suitable for Holden Caulfield's contemporaries in those days, or put it on the children's shelf.

Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball! is a lot more outspoken and explicit and is now considered suitable for readers the age of its characters, which shows, I suppose, how life has caught up with fiction (rather than the other way round). It recalls Salinger in its zest and funniness and, like so much good teenage fiction, is an adult novel that happens to have a young viewpoint, but is not so much (or so necessarily) about a pair of fifteen-year-olds as about the pressures of American life upon them. Pressures...

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1. Introduction
2. Diane Farrell
3. Zena Sutherland
4. The Times Literary Supplement
5. Marilyn R. Singer
6. John Rowe Townsend
7. Diane Gersoni-Edelman
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Mary Silva Cosgrave
10. Zena Sutherland
11. BEVERLY A. HALEY and KENNETH L. DONELSON
12. Isabel Quigly
13. Zena Sutherland
14. Isabel Quigly
15. Stanley Hoffman
16. Joyce Milton
17. Maxine Fisher
18. Jack Forman
19. Cyrisse Jaffee
20. Sally Holmes Holtze
21. Peter Fanning
22. David Rees
23. Paxton Davis
24. Judith N. Mitchell
25. Margery Fisher
26. A. Thatcher
27. Copyright

1. Paul Zindel