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Enormous Surprises
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20545 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1992 |
2,222 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch is professor of English at George Mason
University and is the author of Violence, The Fireman's Wife
and Other Stories, Mr. Field's Daughter, Spirits and Other
Stories, The Last Good Time, and Take Me Back. |
THE SORROWS OF FAT CITY
George Garrett
Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1992
331 pp., $14.95
WHISTLING IN THE DARK
True Stories and Other Fables
George Garrett
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992
225pp., $19.95
I have tried to engage in as many different kinds of writing as I possibly could," George Garrett asserts in The Sorrows of Fat City, his new collection of critical essays, "partly to learn from practical experience." This is an honest statement of an old purpose, and yet one wonders at such modesty, since the phrase "practical experience" seems to imply a kind of apprenticeship. Surely Garrett must have come to the task of writing with an enormous subtlety and sophistication, right from the beginning.
In a career that began with the publication of a collection of poems in the late 1940s and that has spanned more than four decades, Garrett has created a prodigious body of work. He has written in every available genre but often stretching the limits and assumptions of those genres as he went along. At a time when others seem bent on ever-increasing specialization, Garrett is an anomaly of sorts, a man who consistently has gone his own way, writing novels and stories, poetry, and nonfiction as it pleased or interested him. Indeed, he is not easy to place in any literary category.
Many critics, as we all know, do not find it easy to function in the presence of diverse claims upon their attention in a single writer, and thus Garrett has paid a price for his versatility: If he has a strong and loyal readership, he has until recently been relatively unheralded by the literary establishment.
Yet, by any standard of excellence, this writer's list of finished work is imposing: seven novels--including the great Elizabethan Trilogy, Death of the Fox, The Succession, and last year's Entered from the Sun, and six story collections, including An Evening Performance: New and Selected Stories. There have been seven volumes of poetry, two plays, several movies, two critical studies (Sorrows of Fat City is the second), one biography, and, most recently, Whistling in the Dark:
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