THREE PERCEPTIONS
Emerson, Donald
Three Perceptions Pigeon Feathers, by John Updike. Knopf. 279 pp. $4. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, by Richard Yates. Little, Brown. 230 pp. $4.50. I Remember! 1 Remember! by Sean O'Faolain....
...O'Faolain is usually close to his characters rather than remotely objective...
...I he window" is the teim he ices to svmboli/c meaning bev on...
...Ri< hard Yates feels the < oinpassion ol an obseiver who sees each man taught in an impasse...
...They compel the reader to enlarge his conception of the short story, and they make him see what great individuality is possible within the form...
...John I'pdikc has simplv printed enough pieces to make up his book, in the older ol their composition...
...Yates' itonv is not destructive...
...Curioush...
...By expressing every quality of a moment he fixes past and future as well, and gives richness to the evocation...
...He is pressed by an urgent need to save the moment horn oblivion, or to resurrect the grandmother whose silver thimble makes him remember her...
...Above and beyond any single story is the writer's sense ol his task and his struggle to preserve the moments and the persons he has known...
...Yates develops a situation so that its ironies sting...
...Updike creates his stories out of moments captured in their fullness...
...The ihaiacleis and events which lead to an ironic dilemma make up his mutative vet he- is neither cold nor sentiment.i...
...Updike shares Pascal's vision ot men in chains who see their fellows throttled one by one, but his writer's faith saves him from despair...
...Sean O'Faolain has been touched bv the poignancy of the remenibeied past, sometimes tor what is lost, sometimes for the way it colors the present...
...The rewarding experience of each of the volumes is compounded by taking the three together...
...he sees poetic al I v. Pigeon fcatliers as a collection is more than the sum of its parts, for it compounds (he separate pieces into Updike's experience of lile and his attempl to express it...
...His insights arise from sympathy, whether for a woman who rebels against her sister's total retail ol detail in lavor ol her own confused memory of feelings, or for the ambitious and successful man who relletts with shame upon his eaily years...
...To O'Faolain, experience is like the line of life on his palm which hays over the edge...
...Ordinary incidents thus have portentous reality...
...He considers also the mysterious workings of memory itsell...
...I lis repealed subject is the human condition and the wav mens natures coiisphe with c iri unisi.iiK es in bedevil them...
...Updike proves his point in his own collection...
...O'Faolain takes an episode in which past and present intersect, as in a story of middle-aged Irishmen who agonizingly discover how far they have outlived their youthful revolutionary zeal...
...All three of the writers express their personal qualities through their work, and the sense of this remains after plot and characters have blurred into the general impression...
...this simple approach results in a subtle effect...
...he doesn't know wheie each of the little lines begins...
...he captures them live in the cage of his story rather than mounts them as specimens...
...He lives very much in the moment, whether this be the present or a remembered glimpse ol the past, intense perception is his great quality...
...Out of the dissimilar stones comes a definition of the wtilet's creed by which he works and the poetic vision by which he lives...
...Pigeon Feathers is the most deeply personal of the three collections...
...I I he I a< l s ol a slot v. John t'pcltkc creates a litetary sell llnough naltalois who pass under clil-iennt n, lines, lhis person becomes the chiel chaiactei in a loose mutative which tin cads its way through stoiies, biiel pieces almost without plot, and a sermon delivered from the lileguard's chair at the beach...
...II lie has been lorted to accept the iiciuic clcsc i iption of lile in his past woik, the latest ol the stoiies expresses Ins longing and hope lor a 1.n gei view...
...Reviewed by Donald Emerson The good reasons for collecting short stories apply to these three volumes: the writers show to advantage in concentration, and the stories deserve rescue before the old magazines are pulped up for grocery sacks...
...210 pp...
...Richard Yates threads his pieces along the theme ol loneliness, as though he feels the peculiar isolation of everyone in the world and has known some special victims...
...He insists that his cry, fully capturing the moment, will be a cry of joy...
Vol. 26 • August 1962 • No. 8
