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Taking Flight
| Article
# : |
13431 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
3,607 Words |
| Author
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George Garrett
George Garrett is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Virginia. He has written numerous
short story and poetry collections and novels, his latest
being Entered From the Sun. In 1989 he received the T.S. Eliot
Award and more recently, the PEN/Faulkner Bernard Malamud
Award for Short Fiction. |
COOPER
Hilary Masters
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987
248 pp., $16.95
Hilary Masters' latest novel, and his fifth so far among seven books, is first-rate fiction. Lean and economical in both style and structure, it moves urgently forward without any wasted motion - especially the familiar wasted motions of self-conscious and showboat virtuosity or of trendy minimalism. It is, however, more evocative than exhaustive, thus allowing you, the reader, to bring yourself and your sum of experience to the story, inviting you to think and feel and judge as things go along. As intelligent as it is gracefully stylish, Cooper is concerned with problems that matter from the first time you meet them until the last time you see them. It is, then, that rare thing in our time, a novel whose appeal is more than merely aesthetic, a story that moves you as a complete experience. Thus it becomes a part of memory. Something to think about afterward.
Does all this sound like a book-jacket blurb? Good. In a real sense I mean it to. Hilary Masters, here and in his other books, is just too good to be missed. And chances are that you might miss him; for, with the exception of Last Stands: Notes from Memory (1982), his highly original autobiographical essay, his work has been missed by too many. How has that happened? It is a story in and of itself, and we shall have to deal with it (later) here. Writers, certainly publishers, and probably most readers really don't like to hear about those good writers who, for one reason or another or for many reasons, have not been as well known and as well honored as they ought to
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