neiljung78's reviews
293 reviews

Good mix of gossipy trivia and serious stuff

My first Dick Francis! I can see why people like him! Well written, good plot, good character and comic moments. Probably a Tory but not of the worst sort .

Good, though the comic tones could get a bit wearying for me. The ones with an edge of seriousness were best.

A awful lot of faff trying to create the quite dull inner life of the main character and what seemed like Feeling’s own bitter insecurities about the novel he was writing kept intriguing. Sweet FA had happened 70 pages in

Excellent 

Good and interesting and better towards the end but lacking the real largesse and love of life and curiosity that’s in the best Bellow

More of the same lubelike prose, a bit more explicitly comic than some of the earlier books but I did find the gossipy tone and it being set around shabby literary soho pretty entertaining.

I liked this more as it went on and appreciated the humour and insight.

Worth reading for some vivid sketches of America just before and after the war. By turns elegaic and spiky - lots of scores get settled (with Tuman Capote, Bobby Kennedy and - especially - his mother). 

There's a passage in this that seems to anticpate a quite contemporary understanding of how memory works. That's mostly inicdental to what The Symposium is about though!