Dear Editor
Endless Desire Ruth Mathewson's explanation for the staggering success of Colleen McCullough's novel is ingenious ("Putting Down 'The Thorn Birds,' " NL, July 4). Using Northrop Frye's mythic...
...The Thorn Birds being pretty much like every other romance, the reason for its immense and instant popularity is to be found outside of the novel itself specifically, in the publishing industry...
...I cannot believe that Thorn Birds outdoes these tempestuous masterpieces in conventionality...
...Hartford, Conn...
...True as that maybe And from the snippets provided of McCullough's prose and plot who could doubt it?there are other factors to be reckoned with, other explanations...
...The drawing's science-fictionish air places it squarely in the 1950s, when hairy beasts (Communists) menaced the world of clean living (America and Europe...
...Desire may wander endlessly, as Northrop Frye says it does, but it will not wander into a bookstore and lay $10 on the counter...
...Moreover, there are indications that Somalia, angered by the Soviet Union's military support of Ethiopia, may shift its allegiance to the West...
...The largest part of any given year's fiction, after all, consists of little more than supremely conventional works that bear such titles as A Moment Is Forever and Lovefire...
...The hirsute Communist hand coming from Europe's northeast and traipsing into the southwestern democracies may make its point, but only at the expense of grace and subtlety...
...Chicago Lana Herman The Unpredictable The situation around the Red Sea appears to have taken an interesting, unpredictable turn since William J. Gaillard and Margo Hammond wrote their excellent article, "Maneuvers in the Red Sea" (NL, July 4...
...New York City Leonard Kirby Not Me 1 find Anna Quindlen's claim that Brooke Hayward's Haywire is "about us all" hard to believe ("A Fairy Tale Gone Awry," NL, July 18...
...But 1 found the drawing on your July 18 issue disappointing...
...For millions of people, the real crisis is the food bill not their parents' attempt to lead a double life...
...Yet while the workhorses of the romance genre do very well precisely because the reader knows what he will get (the very definition of convention)they do not have first printings of 223,000 copies...
...a foothold in the southern Red Sea something it has not had before, and that it desperately needs to counterbalance the growing Soviet presence...
...Using Northrop Frye's mythic criticism, she arrives at the conclusion that "To say that one cannot put this book down is really another way of saying that it is the most conventional novel to appear in a long time...
...Mark Hodgkiss Changing Times I am a great fan of The New Leader's cover art, and have been for quite some time...
...West Hartford, Conn...
...Not that it was badly done: Sam Kweskin, as your pages have often had occasion to prove, is a fine and witty artist...
...Thus if we want to know why one book made a fortune and another just like it made only a tidy sum, we must look to the publishers' campaigns, and not to what lies between the covers...
...that was sour...
...There is little chance of the Somalis and Ethiopians, now engaged in a full-scale war, patching up their differences in the near future...
...James Blasworthy...
...Certain works, with nothing to recommend them, become, through pre-publication promotion, bestsellers before even 1,000 people have read them...
...Should that happen, its well-equipped, well-trained army (the best in the area, according to Gaillard and Hammond) would give the U.S...
...No, it was the idea The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of Us features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...While that vision is not altogether false-berlinguer and Marchais are un-disputable threat sit is certainly too melodramatic for the 1970s, as well as a violation of a truly intelligent anti-Communism, which does not need to descend to Cold War rhetoric, either in pictures or statements, for its marshaling power...
...I sympathize with Bill Hayward and Margaret Sullavan's anguished children, but my father didn't have 300 pairs of shoes and my mother was not a famous actress...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 17
