|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
We Are the Hollow Men
| Article
# : |
12118 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
1,874 Words |
| Author
: |
Robert Cranny
Robert Cranny is an author and playwright living in New York.
The Big Out is his one-man play based on the life of Ernest
Hemingway. His books include On Us Thy Poor Children and the
forthcoming Faces along the Bar. |
SLOW WALTZ IN CEDAR BEND
Rovert James Waller
New York: Warner Books, 1993
197 pp., $16.95
Robert James Waller's first novel, The Bridges of Madison County, is a best-seller holding a place on the New York Times' list for what seems an eternity. It features a "hero" who is an unattached loner going about the world on photographic assignments, reachable only through his editor's office. He smokes in defiance of the general trend toward healthy abstinence, and he keeps a bottle of booze in the untidy jumble in the cab of his pickup truck. When he is on assignment to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County he stumbles across the wife of a solid, steady man who is off at a 4-H fair with their children. The "hero" promptly sets about repaying the kindness of this woman, given in the form of a dinner in her home, by convincing himself that he will do both himself and her a favor by wooing her and ultimately taking her to bed.
We are given to believe (and apparently a lot of people did) that these two people have rediscovered their lost urge for romance, that the state that a few solid men and women have come to know, real love (which usually is an attitude requiring a series of positive actions rather than a quiver in the loins aided by some good whiskey), doesn't last long on this planet.
In Waller's new book, we are treated to more of the same. Our new "hero," Michael Tillman, is a tenured professor in a midwestern college. From the outset, we are shown that he, like the Bridges hero, is a cut above everyone else around him. He demonstrates his individuality by putting out his cigarettes on the dean's driveway during a party, and he doesn't have a good word to say about any of his colleagues. They are all toadying jerks more concerned with security and the smugness of college life than the slings and arrows of life in the real world beyond their ivy-covered walls. Waller's hero feels the quiver in his loins as soon as Jellie Braden, the wife of a new instructor, makes her appearance at a party.
It is Bridges all over again, except this time the husband is actually present, and, of course, we are immediately made to see that he is a jerk unworthy of his own wife, who somehow must have married him because he was the last man left on God's green earth. She is instantly drawn to Tillman because he has demonstrated his individuality and his romantic nature by stomping out cigarettes on the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
